JohnyML- a Brief Biography

August 23, 2016, 4:33 am

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(JohnyML)

Early Life

Born to late Vakkom K.Lakshmanan and K.Krishnamma in Vakkom in 1969, JohnyML started writing poetry at an early age and got his first poem published when he was thirteen. His father being one of the founder members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) in Kerala, JohnyML developed an interest in politics and started following his father’s footsteps in village reformation. Reading collected writings by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in his teens left a deep impression in him and guided by his mother he started reading poetry and literature avidly. Artist Shibu Natesan who is his first cousin, initiated him into art history.

Education

JohnyML finished his school education in Government High School, Vakkom. He took science stream for his Pre-Degree and spent two years in the Sree Narayana College, Sivagiri, Varkala. During those years he spent a lot of time in Sivagiri, the death shrine of Sree Narayana Guru and studied his works deeply. In 1987, he joined the University College, Thiruvananthapuram and completed his BA and MA in English Language and Literature in 1992. In 1993, he joined the Fine Arts Faculty, MS University, Baroda and took MFA in Art History and Criticism in 1995. In 2003, with the support of the Charles Wallace India Trust he took MA in Creative Curating from the Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. Though he enrolled for a PhD in the IIT Hyderabad, he decided to discontinue it after a year.

Career

After working as a Junior Lecturer in a higher secondary school in Kerala, JohnyML opted to become an art historian and writer. He started off as an art critic in 1995 with Hindustan Times and Indian Express. He went on contributing art columns in all the New Delhi based dailies. His column in the Hindu Business Line in late 1990s consolidated his position as an art critic in Delhi. He has been having his short and prolonged stints as a political journalist since 1997. He became a senior correspondent with the Malayalam Vaarika and in Tehelka.com. He was with Malayala Manoram for a year in 2005.

JohnyML is the founder editor of India’s first online art magazine, mattersofart.com. He also founded and edited one of the most popular online art journals, artconcerns.com (now defunct). He has been an editor of the Art and Deal magazine also has guest edited Art Etc. He contributes to Art India Magazine, Creative Minds, Art Journal and many other exclusive art magazines. Currently he writes in www.stanacemagazine.inand naradanews.com.

As a Blogger

Starting a blog in 2008 was a turning point in JohnyML’s career. As an avid reader and writer, JohnyML started making independent blog entries on art, culture, cinema and life. He named it after the famous statement of Malcolm X, ‘By All Mean Necessary’. This popular blog is largely followed by the art and cultural communities from all over the world. JohnyML is quoted widely in the news reports abroad based on his blog entries. His autobiography ‘To My Children’ is a series of thirty blog entries done between 2010 and 2012.

Curatorial Practice

JohnyML is one of the pioneering curators in India who worked towards bringing respect to curatorial practice, which in India is largely dominated by self-designated people with no academic or practical qualifications. He has curated path breaking shows like ‘Small but Significant’ (2000), ‘Dreams: Projects Unrealised’ (2003), ‘Twilight Zone of the Great Indian Digital Divide’ (2004), ‘Compensation for What has been Lost’ (2006), ‘Video Wednesdays @ Gallery Espace’ (2008-2009), ‘Lensing-it’ (2011), ‘Thekkan Kaattu’ (47^th Annual Exhibition of the Birla Academy, Kolkata), ‘LoC- Line of Control’ (49^th Annual Exhibition of the Birla Academy, Kolkata) and currently working on the Golden Jubilee Exhibitions of the Birla Academy, Kolkata. The other important exhibitions include ‘Cartist Project’ Jaipur, ‘Goa Reloaded’, ‘R.A.P.E –Rare Acts of Political Engagement.’

In 2009 he conceptualized and curated one of the largest murals projects in India. Titled ‘Vibrant Gujarat,’ it was done in a factory interior in Baroda by a team of artists. In the same year he undertook a 3000 kilometer journey across India to research on how art and art history are taught in small town art colleges. JohnyML’s writings on this journey is available on artroutes.in and in his blog.

JohnyML was the Project Director of the United Art Fair (2012) and Pune Biennale (2015)

Books

JohnyML has authored eight independent books so far and has contributed to various volumes. K.S.Radhakrishan (a monograph co-authored with R.Sivakumar), By All Means Necessary (a collection of essays from his blog published by the Kerala Lalitha Kala Academy), The Circle of Life –the Art of Siddharth (Prakriti, Chennai), B.D.Dethan and his Distinct Style (Suryakanthi, Thiruvananthapuram), Straight from Life –animal and bird imageries in Ram Kinkar Baij (Musui Foundation, New Delhi), In the Open (Ojas, New Delhi), Timeless Bronze (Uttarayan, Baroda), Biography of Arvind Kejriwal-India Janadhipathyathileykku (Malayalam published by DC Books), A Pilgrim with a Camera on the Ramp (on the works of Prabuddha Dasgupta published by Ganjam, Bangalore)

Translation

JohnyML is a well known translator who has translated thirteen books so far. He translates international literature into Malayalam.

‘Mistress’ by Anita Nair, ‘Eleven Minutes’ by Paulo Coelho, ‘Embers’ by Sandor Marai, ‘Distant Star’ by Roberto Bolano, ‘I Married a Communist by Philip Roth, ‘Famished Road’ by Ben Okri, ‘Black Book’ by Orhan Pamuk, ‘New Life’ by Orhan Pamuk, ‘Inferno’ by Dan Brown, ‘Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley, ‘Lost Symbol’ by Dan Brown, ‘Strangeness in my Mind’ by Orhan Pamuk, ‘Astonishing the Gods’ by Ben Okri (all for DC Books, Kerala) and ‘Ramkinkar and His Works’ by K.G.Subramanyan (Musui Foundation, New Delhi),

Miscellaneous

JohnyML has travelled in seven countries. He travels all over India to attend seminars and also to teach short terms courses in the universities. He has taught in the National Institute of Design and many other fine arts faculties. He has also directed three documentaries on artists: On Jeram Patel, On N.N.Rimzon and on Sanjeev Sinha. He worked as a campaigner for the Aam Aadmi Party in his village for six months in 2015. However, he does not want to be identified as a hardcore political activist and prefers to be known as a politico-cultural critic. He lives and works from Delhi.

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Those First Twelve Kilometres Where We Prefer to Live, Breath Easy and Fart Easy

August 27, 2016, 8:00 am

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(Dana Majhi carrying his wife's dead body, with his 12 year old daughter)

Dasrath Manjhi and Dana Majhi- does something ring familiar? They are connected by the deaths of their wives. Former in Bihar, when could not find a hospital on his side of the mountain, he had to carry his pregnant and bleeding wife in a hammock and climb the hill to reach the town hospital only to find his wife dead. This incident changed the course of his life. Manjhi started attacking the hill with a vengeance and he relentlessly cut the hill for twenty two years to create a road through the mountain at once reducing the travelling distance between his village the nearest town with medical facilities from fifty five kilometres to fifteen kilometres. The latter, Dana Majhi whose name strangely and eerily sounds same as the former also had to go through a similar ordeal in a different context. His wife was undergoing treatment in a city hospital in the impoverished Kalahandi district in Orissa. She died on Tuesday night and as the hospital denied ambulance services to him for ferrying his wife’s body to his village sixty kilometres away. Majhi decided to walk. He covered the body in a piece of cloth, lunged it over his shoulders and started walking towards his village with a determination to cover the distance, a wailing twelve year daughter beside.

This much and a little bit more everyone knows by now. It is clear that Majhi walked for twelve kilometres and then some local people intervened. Sensational as it was the news flew thick and fast; district collector ordered an ambulance and cremation cost of Rs.2000/- under Rajaharischandra Scheme. The man’s determination won against the apathy of the hospital authorities and it did create flutters in the political circles of Orissa.

(Dasrath Manjhi, the Mountain Man)

It was an unfortunate incident. True. But what makes it more unfortunate and a real tragedy is not just the hospital authorities denying him ambulance service and not even the man’s determination to walk with the dead body over his shoulders. The tragedy lies in the fact that he was allowed to walk like that for twelve kilometres by the local people! It was at the twelfth kilometre they could find people left with some conscience in their existence. Their intervention turned out to be crucial in changing the course of events. But what were the people doing in the first twelve kilometres? Did they walk through absolutely deserted areas? Did they pass through the villages with similarly poverty stricken people? Or did they pass through some philosophers’ streets where they deem death as a natural culmination in whichever form it comes? Or did they go by such streets where rich and powerful lived and thought that death would never dare even to look at them?

Those first twelve kilometres that Majhi walked with his wife’s dead body and a minor daughter in tow are the ideal sample that could measure up the totality called India which claims to be moving from development to development, leaving its subjects to rot, die or commit suicide with nothing to hold on to or redeem themselves. In an India where cow protection is much more important than human protection, imaginary representation of a country in the form of a goddess and protecting her as the prime aim of each confirming citizen than protecting their own female folk, Majhis are one day’s breaking news and next day’s trash. I see a lot of breast beating on this incident in Orissa in social media. But none of these breast beaters has asked about the first twelve kilometres’ response. The day we correct the first twelve kilometres, India will be alright because majority of us prefers to live in those first twelve kilometres. And Majhis carrying dead bodies of their hapless women is not the kind of first scene that we would like to wake up to. We need the visions of some winking babas who would help us breathe easy and fart easy.

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The Irony of Mainstream Patronage for Political Art in India

August 30, 2016, 11:27 pm

≫ Next: Political Among Falsely Political Artists: Know SM Sultan (1923-1994)

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There is no art which is not political. Human beings are fundamentally political animals. Therefore, art created by human beings cannot be nothing but political. When some people particularly qualify themselves as political artists I find it a bit difficult to digest. If it is art, it has to be political nothing else. But most often we do not look at a work of art as a political entity. This happens because we have been trained to look at a work of art in terms of aesthetics. Truth, Soul and Beauty-these are the three aspects that we are taught as the prime qualifications that art should have or that it should evoke. Nobody has told us that it is about the political understanding of the artist who has created the work of art too. It is not taught to us so mainly because politics as not the prime mover of human emotions in the beginning. While beauty, soul and truth moved people or rather they wondered at these as manifested in natural and man-made things, politics was too materialistic a thing which created patterns of rule and subjections in the minds of the people. Politics was result of the organization called society. Hierarchies were the hallmarks of that realm. But in the realm of beauty, truth and soul, there were no hierarchies so to speak.

Hence, when someone speaks of political art or being a political artist, he/she feels that s/he is adding a new dimension which has been shunned so far by art. Hypothetically speaking, the day a social organization called society came in place, the next dawn witnessed the artist from that society doing his work of art with a subtle difference. He was adding one more dimension to his works; his thoughts on the society, his political thoughts. Today, we point out the works of Banksy or the overtly political Ai Wei Wei and say that they are political artists. We also pick and choose the works of Somnath Hore, Chittoprasad and Zainul Abdein and say that they did political art. Going back further wee show the works of the Bengal School artists and say that they did political art in a different way because they were supporting the nationalist cause by rejecting the western norms of art creation. History, with its mechanical methodologies and perspectives has conveniently categorized what is political and what is not political in art. I will not blame because at the outset, history also would do some categorizing efforts before writing critical histories. However, today, it is absolutely fallacious to say that some are political and some others are apolitical in their creativity. What I see is only the degrees of suggestion. Let me explain.

You pick up the picture of Mahatma Gandhi, blacken his tooth with dark paint, you paint some scenes from contemporary or historical uprisings, you express some left wing political ideologies using red colour, you do something interventionist in terms of art, you do a performance and make your political stance on an issue clear- any of these could confer you the title of being a political artist. But an artist who paints the simplicity of nature, the village folk, inconspicuous village or city scapes, river fronts, forests, inconsequential people and so on we say he/she is apolitical or just an artist who makes beautiful pictures. Here the word ‘beautiful’, which is foundational to art, sounds almost as a bad word; an accusation. To put it in different words, if artists are indulged in overtly recognizable socio-political issues both in intelligent and unintelligent ways, with or without giving any respect to form and rhythm which are again the fundamentals of art (making), we call them political artists, while we disparagingly look at those artists who give a lot to create a sense rhythm, harmony and formal cohesiveness but with no overtly recognizable political references. This is the fallacy of our times.

A work of art which is severely political cannot enjoy the mainstream patronage because a political work of art gains its name from being an aesthetical object or idea which goes against the grain of the dominant ideology that rules the society. The dominant ideology protects the rich and powerful and also helps in maintaining all the exploitative systems. If political art is resistive in nature how could it be a part of the dominant system and enjoy the state as well as private patronage? Perhaps, in Indian context at least, I would say this category of calling artists political art or their works political is absolutely wrong because the number of political artists, self proclaimed and otherwise do enjoy dominant ideological patronage. This could happen only in an Orwellian scenario and it is happening in India. Journalists without knowing anything about the art which they are writing about use platitudes like ‘political art/ist’ to qualify certain kinds of art and artists. This has further worsened scenario. Those people who do performance art at times tend to call themselves political; but anything that is done within controlled atmosphere with implications of danger is not called political art but stunt. Such stunts keep happening in places like Khoj International. In our present socio-cultural and political situation of the country, if a real political art comes out that artist will be behind the bars. That is not happening; that means no real political art is happening in this country. Stunt men are not arrested. They are always back patted.

Let me come back to my personal views on political art and why I call all the works of art are political and only the degree difference is palpable. At the outset itself I have made it amply clear that a work of art is produced by a human being and a human being as part of a society has to have political thinking and it would naturally be reflected in the works of art he does. That means, a work of art does not take place in a vacuum. Modernists all over the world tried their best to create the original mood, without being referenced by external sources. Some of them were successful only to become self imitation artists by losing the ability to be original as they are referring to themselves. Some of them including Picasso failed miserably on this front because he too had to go for the unexplored tribal cultures for newer and exciting forms. Yet another lot who insisted that nothing matters in this world other than the harmonies they could conjure in their minds and push their expressions at par with music embarked on a very confusing journey of abstraction. While some of them knew what they did, at present I can be so sure that the majority of the artists who do abstraction do not themselves know where to begin and where to end. Their verbalization on their works are either restricted to form and colour or to some esoteric spirituality. Most often the verbalizing of both the abstract artists and their critics are equally humbug, ‘full of words signifying nothing.’

However, the decision to do abstract art is a political stance. A world that makes too much of sense in concrete forms could be objectionable for some personalities. They retreat to abstraction as a political stance. This is an apolitical stance which in fact is a political declaration; ‘I do not want to make meanings’. But to arrive at that decision one has to have a strong political awareness. Those artists who do landscapes, city scapes, memory drawings and what not, are doing political art because they are functioning from within a society. But to call oneself a political artist, one has to have such conviction. But all those who have such conviction would never say that they are political artists. A simple glace at them would reveal what exactly their art says. If everyone is an artist, then it should also be taken for granted that everyone is a political artist too. But the quality of politics is very important. One has to know what politics is and what is quality politics in art? If someone keeps on painting the faces of beautiful women I will not discount him of his chance for being a pro-woman artist. But then it depends on why he does such art. If he says or at least believes that he does so for the market wants to so then the degree of his politics drains out completely leaving some dregs. Art exposes the artist behind it.

During Italian Renaissance, the mega geniuses of art, culture, science, exploration, architecture, music and so on, operated under the pressure of political intrigues and conspiracies of the Medici family that invested heavily in their creative works. The artists falling in and out of favour of the Medici elders was a common phenomenon and the ire of the masters would have costed the artists of their lives even. So working under them needed a lot political loyalties, strategies and survival plans. One could have been heavily critical of the theocratic state of Italy of that time but as artists they had to find different ways to express their differences with the state; which they did in their works interpolating them with extra-scriptural narratives or scenes from parallel theologies. We live in a world where the political loyalty of artists always stands in doubt. Artists have become much liberated people who need not necessarily be displaying their loyalties in public. However, their works would speak for themselves. However, we see artists who are claiming themselves to be political artists and enjoying state patronage. We see artists vying to become political artists. But I say I real political artist need not either say it or use overt political themes or ideas. If the artist is intensely political and stands for the theory of ‘unto the last’, then his or her work would say it. Rest is bullshit.

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Political Among Falsely Political Artists: Know SM Sultan (1923-1994)

September 1, 2016, 2:12 am

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(SM Sultan 1923-1994)

Run an image search in Google and type ‘Sheikh Mohammed Sultan’. You will get a series of pictures of Dubai Sultans in their various regal attires. Change the search into ‘all’ and see the pages popping up; they too show various Sultans from the Middle Eastern countries. But you are not really looking for these royal heads. You are in search of an artist who lived his life the ‘way’ he wanted. Far from the madding crowd, from the glitter and glamour of the celebrity world of successful artists, at the banks of river Chitra in Narail District, Bangladesh, this ‘Sultan’ lived, painted, exhibited and both the liberal and the conservative governments of the country finally had to acknowledge his contributions towards humanity through his art by conferring the country’s highest civilian award, ‘Ekushey Padak’ in 1982. In 1994, Sheikh Mohammed Sultan aka SM Sultan, a ‘political’ artist who lived that word to the core passed away at age of 71.

SM Sultan did not seek fame and fortune. As he did not go after these, we did not come to know about him. We have this wonderful tendency to celebrate anybody as genius provided he/she has gained material success. Subodh Gupta’s works look extremely exotic when we see those works against the fact that Gupta has recently bought a house for Rs.100 Crores. When an artist purchases a BMW and claims that he is a ‘political’ artist, we tend to believe his words. Most of our political artists debate their hearts out for the poor and downtrodden at the conference halls of the India Habitat Centre and India International Centre and once the heated discussions are over, and the bourgeoisie and fascist regimes are toppled then and thereby force, fatigued these political artists head to the nearest five star watering holes to down some expensive drinks to drown that revolutionary weariness. SM Sultan was none amongst these; Dhaka, the Capital of Bangladesh too had/has an elite but Sultan shunned it like plague. Sultan was a political artist. And he never claimed to be one.

(work by SM Sultan)

When I go through the life and times of SM Sultan, I cannot just resist myself from drawing parallels with the life and times of our own Ram Kinkar Baij. Strange it is that geniuses manifest on the face off this earth in regular intervals, perhaps in the same geographical locations but eerily separated by the thin membrane of nationalities, lack of information or even by chance. Ram Kinakar Baij was seventeen years older to SM Sultan. In the childhood, however both of them passed through the phase of poverty and struggle. But what goaded them through those tough days was their indomitable spirit to create beauty. Baij was found out by Ramananda Chatterjee, the noted scholar and editor of Modern Review and introduced him to Tagore in Santiniketan and the rest is history. Sultan did not have money to study art and Calcutta Government School of Art was the only institutions that beckoned him. The Zamindar of his village, Dhirendranath Roy offered him a scholarship and the young Sultan reached Calcutta, only to be ‘found out’ by the poet and art critic Shahid Suhrawardi (1890-1965). Suhrawardi prepared the young Sultan to be a future art student and artist.

Sultan was ‘political’ from the very beginning. Within three years, even after studying under the illustrious artist Mukul De who had encouraged his students to throw the British style of copying masters to learn skills and paint from life, Sultan felt that his life was not to be spent inside the classrooms. Sultan became a wanderer. The Second World War was on and along his routes Sultan found military encampments. He drew the portraits of the soldiers and the villages around those camps. He went to Shimla and lived there amongst the villagers. He also had a stint in Kashmir. All these while, written documents as well as sparsely available visual documents say that Sultan was painting landscape and a little bit of people here and there in Impressionistic style, especially that of Van Gogh. After 1947, he went to back to his own village but soon left for Karachi in Pakistan, where he did some teaching and conducted some exhibitions. An international artists’ exchange program took him to the US in 1951 and he could travel there extensively and conduct exhibitions in all the major cities including Washington DC and Chicago. While coming back he visited Britain and participated in a group show which also featured Picasso, Braque and Dali in London.

(work by SM Sultan)

Sultan was political the way Buddha was political in his time. There was a sea change in Sultan once he came back from the US. The materialism of the world seemed to have choked his soul. He retreated to a dilapidated house near the River Chitra and shunned all human contacts for a few years. In the meanwhile Sultan developed the life style of a hermit living with snakes, reptiles, birds, cats and dogs. Slowly he started befriending the rural folk who toiled in the soil to create food for the country. He wondered why those people who work for two square meals a day and owned no land, never got featured in any of the city talks, films, art forms and so on. Sultan felt that the country as a whole and the world in general was doing absolute injustice to the peasant folk of his country; not just of his country but the peasants of any country. He decided that he should be painting the life and times of these peasants. More than that, he decided that he should be painting for the folks, not for the considered appreciation of the connoisseurs in the urban centres. Sultan broke his silence with people. He started meeting the villagers who soon grew fond of him. Children came to learn drawing from him. Like his master Dey, Sultan too asked the children to paint whatever came to their mind or whatever they liked. Poor villagers came to him thinking that they could get some food. He did provide them with food and soon they too were found painting.

An artist operating from outside the economics of the country would find it difficult to gather raw materials for his works. Sultan did not have anything to do with the mainstream economy. Hence he visited village shops, collected gunny bags, seasoned and strengthened it by adding some natural glue. He created his own colours using various oxides; villagers came to help him in making his canvases and also in preparing colours. He painted the lives of the people around him; and made it a point that he would never feature anything urban in his works. He saw the impoverished peasants living in abject poverty and deprived living conditions. Sultan decided to redeem them like a romantic prophet, in his canvases. He painted them with highly accentuated musculatures. The musculatures ceased to look like human muscles on the contrary they started looking like decorative embellishments. He painted complex narratives bringing the agriculture related life of the poor peasants as if they were warriors in the battle of survival and Sultan insisted that in this battle the final victory was always of the peasants. The complex narratives painted by Sultan in his innumerable canvases also show the artist’s familiarity with the mural paintings not only Indian but also of Europe. Somehow, our fixed ideas of reading a work of art under the light of world or national art history fail here in the case of Sultan mainly because he never fixes his works on a single stylistic feature. There is a sense of destabilization in his narratives and apparently what holds them together as the works of Sultan is the presence of musculature. There have been efforts by a few Bangladeshi writers to locate Sultan’s works somewhere in the scheme of Paul Gauguin but both thematically and historically Sultan differs completely from Gauguin. Sultan could never have exoticized or exploited his own people.

(Lumbini Series by KCS Panicker)

When Sultan painted in his dilapidated mansion which was good for shooting a horror movie than actually living in, cats and birds came and climbed on his canvas and looked him working. He never shooed them away, rather he loved them to be there. If there was a plant growing between him and the canvas, he never disturbed the plant and tried to paint above the plant. For the interested ones to see Sultan’s paintings, he/she had to go to the some other houses or shops where they could find his large canvases used as room partitions or reinforcements to roofs. Sultan never thought his paintings were of any other use than what people think about them. Some people, when they saw Sultan painting their live stock celebrated the artist. Some said the plants in his works were their plants. Villagers were very happy about Sultan’s paintings which made Sultan more and more indebted to them and their lives. Sultan was like Baij in these ways. Sultan never married because he was a person not fit for a familial life. But once he developed a close relationship with the village folk, he grew fond of a destitute widow with two daughters and brought them to live with him in the ruined building. One can think of a parallel with Radharani in Baij’s life.

The more I look at the works of Sultan, the more I think about the paintings of K.C.S.Panicker done in 1960s. In his Lumbini series, and all those works he did before embarking on the legendary ‘Words and Symbols’ series, Panicker had created certain stylized images and with the help of that stylization he had even painted clusters of people one of which is surprisingly titled as ‘Malabar Peassants.’ Panicker took a different route and ended up in a very complex art lingua which later helped many of his disciples to escape from reality to some romantic notions about spirituality. Sultan was a materialist in that sense; but a materialism that worked against the capitalist materialism. He placed his works clearly against the urban agenda of development. He found the ‘inner strength’ of the peasant folk and insisted that the ornamental musculature in his paintings is nothing but the inner strength of the poor peasants.

(Tareque Masud and Mishuk Munier shooting Adam Surot)

Sultan would have been lost to the world despite the awards and recognition he had received from the neo-rich and the middle class in Bangladesh, had it not been the two decade long documentary efforts of late Tareque Masud. He wanted to study films in Pune Film institute. Masud had obtained a scholarship also. But General Irshad captured power in Dhaka and cancelled all Indian scholarship. Masud collected money from family sources and decided to go to New York to pursue his interest. But then he heard that Sultan was ailing. Between New York and Sultan, Masud waited for a sign to decide. He was waiting at a bus stop and it was getting late. The more he stood there the more he thought of Sultan and by the time the bus arrived, Masud had dropped the New York idea. He put the money to buy film rolls and his university friend Mishuk Munier as cameraman, Masud went into the making of ‘Adam Surot’ (Inner Strength). Today, we learn more about SM Sultan through this humble documentary by Masud which was released in 1989. Unfortunately, Tareque Masud and Mishuk Munier died in a car accident in 2011. Masud’s was a political act of making a documentary on a political artist who stood outside the mainstream course of art.

PS: I am thankful to my mentor, K.S.Radhakrishnan for introducing me to the life and times of SM Sultan and related research materials.

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How Vivan Sundaram and Company Killed Indian Art

September 1, 2016, 8:40 pm

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(Somehow I feel I am welcomed with a mid finger when I see this at the International Airport in Delhi)

If your mind allows you to take your attention off from your own temporary glory of walking along the carpeted corridors of the international airports in Delhi or Mumbai, within that transitory zone you would come across the works of art done by Indian artists carefully culled and artistically displayed there in conspicuous and inconspicuous walls and corners. However, I haven’t yet seen people taking selfies before these works of art. Instead, they go to the generic yet spectacular gestures and physical movements captured in fibreglass sculptures and take selfies. Let me tell you, this is not done by uninitiated folks alone. I have seen reputed gallerists posing before these sculptural atrocities, taking selfies and posting them instantly in their social media pages to tell the world that they are on the move! I do not take pictures in airports. However, these works of art displayed in various joints at the airports, for me, underline the presence of the invisible middlemen/women who have ‘arranged’ the procurement of these works. I have felt this invisible presence of the so called art consultants when I walk through the hotel lobbies and hospital aisles. I see well known names but sub standard works. Something has gone terribly wrong in our country.

It is said each public building should invest seven per cent of its total cost in procuring art as a part of promoting culture in the country. And they do spend this money on art. But the kind of art that we happen to come across in the public buildings makes our skin cringe in shame. But there is a huge danger than the general embarrassment caused by these works of art. The people from abroad, with a cultural outlook, a museum culture that has shaped their sensibilities etc., upon seeing these works of art in the airports and public buildings, could think that this is the kind of art that we still produce. My readers must remember that it was a couple of months back a British art critic had rubbished Bhupen Khakar’s show in Tate saying that Khakar’s paintings were as good as the mediocre artists in London in 1980s. The foreigners who see Indian art in public buildings and airports would definitely have the same feeling. They could think that we Indians are still producing some kind of art that they had already discarded decades back.

(Going with times- manual for Suryanamaskara in IGIA Delhi)

What has gone wrong with our art? Is it because India lacks in good art; I mean good paintings, sculptures, prints, photography and so on? Our Prime Minister recently had initiated a ‘Skill India’ campaign. This campaign comes from the fact that as Indians we have been lacking in the required skill sets to be at par with the world. The illusionary jump in the job market, especially in the IT field is purely based on supplementary skills or auxiliary skills than the primary skills. We are always the supporting staff. Hence, even if I do not agree with the political policies of the present Prime Minister of India, I would definitely say that skill development in India is one of the core areas that needs urgent attention including in the field of fine arts. Knowingly or unknowingly the Prime Minister has touched upon the crucial problem that the British education had created in India and later on by careful strategizing of the western cultural industry aided by their handpicked Indian artists and intelligentsia in order finish off Indian skills. Without understanding the kind of trap that they have been walking into, these artists and intelligentsia worked as stooges for the western cultural interests and almost killed the fine arts skills of India.

When Lord Macaulay introduced the educational policy for the colonial subjects in India in 19^th century, his aim was clear. He knew for sure that it was difficult to break the backbone of Indian culture by destroying its innate skills and concepts. The best way was not only to create ‘Indian looking and British thinking’ subjects to keep accounts and audits of the Empire in India and serve it ideologically through education but also to destroy the confidence of the Indians by making them feel that anything that was native including language was inferior to whatever English was. More than creating clerks and administrative staff (the way call centres are created today by the imperial corporate houses), the British were successful in creating Indians who felt themselves ugly and less skilled compared to the technical efficiency that the British people displayed. Our art schools were conceived as technical education centres where draftsmen were trained to work for various British departments. Students from the traditional artisanal families were culled and mentally castrated by inducing them with the western scientific skills in drawing as well as in conceptualizing. The traditional skills which had been polished in various schools and gharanas since the Mughal period and their hybrid varieties both in the fiefdoms and bazaars were in fact creating a larger climate for the proliferation of visual art which the British had carefully killed. By making our art and art practices inferior to the western art, they created a new history in which Indian artists always looked derivatives of the western masters.

(Inside the Louvre Museum in Paris)

It took many years for our artists aided by the nationalistic thoughts and later by individualistic pursuits in order to create Indian art outside the clutches of the western art knowledge and skills. It was not an exclusionary and parochial practice. On the contrary it was political and at the same time it was the basic search for human dignity and identity with which an artist could stand at par with anybody in the world irrespective of the kind of art education he or she had gained. Depending on the skill sets that the Indian artists had, and also polishing it for the contemporary purposes in the light of the imported skills enabled the Indian artists to develop their art. After Independence there was a surge in Indian art and there had been various enquiries to find indigenous art expressions, styles and identities from various parts of India. Under the doyens like K.G.Subramanyan, KCS Panicker, J.Swaminathan and so on, Indian artists were looking for a cosmopolitan, egalitarian and dignified Indian art. It was not simply a fight for identity; it was a sort of reinvesting the faith in Indian traditions, which was dominantly secular. This high thrust in the field of art, had the momentum been maintained would have pushed Indian art into the world scenario and the international cultural attention would have naturally fallen on India. It would have created huge tourism possibilities and thereby economic prosperity even if Indian economy was natioanlized and protectionist in nature then.

India would have grown with this attitude; a home, a Bajaj Scooter and a work of art at home. Had India kept the momentum on the production of art the way it was in 1970s and 1980s it would have been possible. The western cultural industry knew the dangers of it. With the advent of 1990s and also with the opening of global market in India and vice versa, the western cultural Tsars strategically declared that painting was dead. They started promoting conceptual art and impermanent installation art. Their materialistic and philosophical circumstances were conducive to propagate that idea. But they knew for sure that their museums, which were the backbones of their natural cultural industries and economies, were filled with paintings and traditional kinds of art. They also knew that if India becomes the hub of art making, then the international tourism would turn its attention to India and Indian artists would rule the world. It was then they acknowledged and approved certain artists like Vivan Sundaram and literally projected them as the right kind of artists for India. Vivan Sundarm single handedly worked for the western interests. He became the proponent of the installation and conceptual art and encouraged a lot of young artists to abandon traditional skills and get into the making of impermanent art. In 1990s, he like a fervent missionary did this ‘service’ for the western world. Geeta Kapur, the art critic created an adequate obscure theoretical atmosphere so that the artists who practiced traditional skills felt inferior within that climate. Their agenda was later on picked up by Khoj International and then by the Arts and Aesthetic Department at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

(1.25 billion people in India. These two people decided what their 'good' art should be. Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur)

When the Indian art market opened up, the western world did a U-turn which both Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur could not handle. The western cultural industry declared (not in literal terms) that painting was no longer dead. It was resurrected. Paintings that depicted the glittering world of money and power and superficiality of contemporary life were given philosophical justifications. Everyone painted. Everyone sculpted. Everyone photographed. Everyone did videos. Everyone did digital works. Everyone did anything that involved skills. ‘Skill’ was the mantra of the time. Vivan Sundam fell behind because he was no skill man. But unfortunately, those artists who believed in Vivan Sundaram and his conceptual practice groped left and right to gain some foothold in the burgeoning art market of that time. Artists who studied in various colleges, but unfortunately with less aggression and a lot skill became assistants to the artists including none other than Vivan Sundaram. Sundaram even went on to the extent of making works of art based on Ram Kinkar Baij, absolutely deserting those new converts along the way. He brought out two volumes on the works of his aunt, Amrita Sherghil, who was definitely not an installation artist.

I do not believe in conspiracy theories. But I cannot reject the fact that Vivan Sundarm knew that art with no skill would not last long. If you remember there was a frantic situation created by Geeta Kapur, Ranjit Hoskote, Nancy Adajania and their junior versions in the art scene. They were quoting European critics and philosophers to justify Indian impermanent art. Without Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, Danto, Guittari and Deleuze Indian art sounded incomplete. But I demand an answer from the abovementioned people why they justified Indian art with those philosophical tools that even the west itself has rejected in due course of time. Indian art is suffering because of these people. It has to change. India has to find its skills and concepts. India should be filled with art. Each household in India should have a work of art. And it is possible, I believe. If the general cultural climate is vibrant with various kinds of art practices, then I am sure none could be away from that flow. ‘How good and pleasant it could be before god’ and artist you have a work of art in your bed room, study room, drawing room and love it the way you love your beloved. It is possible. It is possible because that is the only way to save India from the redundancy of visual culture created by Vivan Sundaram and his ilk, and also from the bigots who create the climate of ‘we’ and ‘they’. Let’s be the Renaissance people, finding the genius, vouching for them, taking pride in them and celebrating them. Yes, we do not discard installation art because that too needs skills and concepts, but definitely not of deliberate obscurantism .

↧

A Wild Wish

September 4, 2016, 10:42 pm

≫ Next: Who Killed Indian Art History and Critical Writings?

≪ Previous: How Vivan Sundaram and Company Killed Indian Art

If I die

Bury me or burn me at the nearest

Cremation ground abandoned

Let there be no epitaphs

Condolence meetings

And obits by the undeserving

For I have been a soul

Unbridled by the pettiness

That marks the contours

Of average human behaviour.

I feasted on history

And the fuel that it imparted

Fired me to go miles

In the paths of righteousness

And mostly was all alone.

I broke my fasting

Each dawn on truths

Drinking its sourness

In the cups of Socretean

Determination.

I lunched on pity

That the loving craftsmen

Placed before me

In the platters of love,

I supped in the taverns

Of loneliness where

Similar souls sat

In corners dark

Contemplating on life

Before marking them

In their weary diaries.

I slept on cold benches

Of experiences

All alone with aching joints

But thinking of all those

Who had fared so in jails

My aches lessen like

Wild fire, slowly but steadily.

I dreamt the dreams

Where everyone in the world

Sang, danced, painted, sculpted

Wrote their live in all sincerity

And gifted each other

To be displayed in their hearths and hearts.

The day will come

When my dreams

All would live their lives

In reality; here and now.

In those days my posterity

Will see both states and religions

Wither away slowly

Leaving ugly stains on the pavements

Like on a rainy day

But all those will also fade away

Leaving the world green and blue

With all the colours of rainbows.

Hence when I die

Bury me in the nearest

Cremation ground or burn me

Leaving no trace

For the youngsters to wonder

Why such people lived

Who kept worrying about

The growing discontent

Of the world due to religions

And power.

In a world where

They find no stain of religion

That marks and brands people

Even my memories could be

An anachronism.

Let me be the last one to breath

The stale air of religion

And bruised by the barbed wires

Of boundaries abundant.

My grave should be obscure

Like any other hapless mounds

On the last souls’ fields.

A future should flourish

Where none hates none

For the reason of religion and power.

↧

Who Killed Indian Art History and Critical Writings?

September 5, 2016, 8:21 pm

≫ Next: Civilizing Rituals: Guernica Stretcher in MoMA and the Works of Art in Our Cultural Institutions

≪ Previous: A Wild Wish

(Art India Magazine)

A young artist friend asks me who could be the right documenters or right carriers of the new art that would come out as a result of finding a fine balance between craft and concept or rather skill and idea. In different contexts I have answered this question previously, however let me approach the issue afresh. Recently in the Indian Express daily, I happened to read a piece of art promotional writing based on an exhibition which is currently on in one of the Laddo Sarai galleries in Delhi. What struck me was the theme of the exhibition: Partition of Indian sub-continent in 1947. There is private joke among us, a few friends that in North India artists are still hung up with partition blues. In South, which is comparatively unaffected by the woes of partition artists fall back to the Second World War and dig up some distant connection that their family members had with the notorious war. In East, especially in Bengal, it is all about colonialism. The contemporary artists there, like termites just hit the family albums and yarn stories out of those fading black and white pictures. In Mumbai, it’s all about the retrieval of land from the seven islands and the kinds of riots and natural calamities that the city has survived. To put it in nutshell, Mumbai artists’ works are Hemingway-esque; the perennial struggle of man and his ultimate victory. Unfortunately, the artists who came from Jammu a couple of years back to the mainland due to the flash floods that disrupted human life in the state, somehow displayed their extreme desire to discard anything historical and traditional and indulged in heavy duty performance art. This is an interesting aspect to be studied in detail taking the psychological impact of the prolonged political, social, cultural and religious unrest in the state on the young artists, who by default become the unacknowledged legislators of their own human constituencies. But alas, we do not have enough art critics or historians who share such angst.

Before we go into the question that my young friend has raised, let me continue with the Laddo Sarai artist story. The insistence of the young woman artist on partition issues made me curious to read further. In one of the earlier paragraphs the artist claims that her parents migrated to India from the newly formed Pakistan (obviously in 1947). I just got into a simple calculation. If the parents of the artist were ten years old then they must be 80 years old now. The artist is 31 years old. The average age of the parents whose kids are now in their thirties must be maximum 60. If they are sixty or even 70 now, they must have been either one year old or must not have even taken birth. I felt that the artist was telling lies or making up a story to create some effect. Definitely, her parents might have come from Pakistan but they were not her parents then. And I doubt someone who is born in mid 1980s and grew up mostly in 1990s is deeply disturbed by the partition issues. Partition, unfortunately has become a part of the cultural industry today. In the last India Art Fair (January 2016), I found a booth where people were invited to speak about partition in camera. I too was invited and I refused to contribute to the project because my experiences of partition are minimal and if at all I have any they are cultural in nature imparted to me by the works of various films, documentaries, writers and historians including Sadat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, Ajeet Caur and lately Saeed Naqvi. Hence, if a young artist with all her democratic rights to pursue any subject of her interest anywhere in the world still pursues partition as an issue in her art, I cannot technically question it. But I would say that it is the creation of false history/histories, which is superficial and sentimental to certain extent.

(Partition blues)

Why such falsities are circulated in the visual cultural scene of India, which otherwise has a very vibrant cultural scene? Often it is said that we do not have the right kind of art critics and historians in our country who could create an adequate discourse on visual culture in India. Partly it is true. We heavily depend on the journalists and art writers for knowing about art. In fact, we cannot and should not blame the art journalists and art writers for percolating bad ideas or wrong ideas about art. Most of the journalists write what they are told to write. With a variety of subjects that they have to handle on a daily basis (in art itself) they do not get enough time to research or understand what they are dealing with. That does not mean that they do not do their homework. Journalists before meeting the artists, definitely do certain homework including running a Google search before they meet the artist and his/her show. However, journalists are those people who look for a ‘story idea’ or an ‘interesting angle’ or ‘something that captures the readers’ mind’. Hence, unless there is something politically important in the subject, they quiz the artists to eke out ‘stories’ and we should know that artists are also full of stories. Out of the many ‘stories’ that the artist gives to the journalist, he/she picks up one and pegs the whole exhibition narrative in it. The report then remains ‘true’ as far as the artist is concerned but ‘false’ in the case of the real intention of the art works or the show itself. When it comes to the mainstream artists whose histories and stories are already in the public domain, journalists focus more on the present body of works and details them by giving ample amount of first person narrative by the artist himself/herself. Art writers in various magazines too do the same but as they are magazine writers, they give personal twists and turns to the work of art depending on their imaginative prowess.

In such a scenario we cannot depend on newspaper writing for historical or critical assessment of the works. They at the most serve the purpose of provenance creation for the future market. For a historian or a critic, these newspaper writings could serve only the purpose of partial documentation; either they take the time and place of the exhibition and a little of first person narratives. I have never heard in the recent times that a historian or a critic ever quoting a journalist while writing about an artist. When it comes to the art magazines, especially in the Indian art scene, we have different standards for different magazines. Let me take two prominent art magazines in India; Art India Magazine and Take on Art. There used to be a time when getting noticed by the Art India Magazine was considered to be some sort of national and international recognition for the artist. But the Art India Magazine degenerated on two counts; one, it set a benchmark for the Brahminical practice in Indian art. It vertically and horizontally divided the Indian art scene into culturally elite and low brow art and catered both in different terms, by giving intellectual prominence to the former and business presence to the latter. Two, it standardised the critical language into a sort of whispering and assumed a sort of Victorian Puritanism. Art India Magazine played a psychological war with the Indian art scene by introducing international writers with long list of credentials (may be Art India Magazine found out that India does not have such writers with white skin and long list of credentials) but with partial understanding of Indian contemporary art. But their half baked ideas set the benchmark for Indian art writing, which has been heavily followed by the late entrant Take on Art Magazine. Take on Art Magazine, in the long run may be considered to be one of the strangely mutated cultural products in the world because of its lack of direction. Apparently, Take on Art Magazine brings out curated/thematic issues depending on where it gets released but the unfortunate thing is that this magazine has absolutely failed to create any cultural discourse in India. In this mutual admiration club, Take on Art magazine plays a second fiddle to Art India Magazine. The condition of the other magazines like Art and Deal, Creative Minds and the Mumbai Art Journal are further pathetic as they cater to anything and everything.

(Take on Art)

When we discuss art writing and documentation, we need to look at a couple of other avenues where we could see intelligent writing or art documentation. At present I could say that only the Asia Art Archives is doing a diligent job by documenting and categorizing historical as well as critical writing on Indian art and most importantly leaving it as an open source. Critical Collective is another avenue came up recently but unfortunately it is a business venture than an art historical support structure in India. Though the people behind the Critical Collective make sincere attempts to gather critical and historical writings from various sources, by making it a closed source and open only against an annual subscription, it has moved against the spirit of our times where services of various kinds are offered freely in the market. Art history cannot be a closed source.

Noted film maker Karan Johar in the recently held Express Adda opined that the film writers should be paid at par with the directors and other technicians involved. The same view could be applied to the Indian art scene. There is a complaint that most of the Indian art history and criticism graduates look for better jobs in galleries or museums or similar institutions elsewhere mainly because being independent art historian or critic does not pay enough to make a decent living. It is true to certain extent. Art history does not pay nor does art criticism. If people are not reading art criticism and history the reason is it is not a glamorous field. People would read art history and criticism when art has something interesting to say and the historians and critics have something interesting talk about it. There should be more avenues and there should be enough money from some sources so that the art historians and critics could write about the newer forms of art which balance both skills and ideas and craft and concept. In the present scenario, I do not think that the galleries and museums would ever support art history or critical writing. When that is the case, there should be volunteering efforts from the art history and criticism graduates to embark on a very difficult journey. They should take up their interest areas and start documenting on their own for the larger good of art and also the larger culture of our country. If they are making their money to lead a decent life from elsewhere, they need not please anybody and they could write their minds in the avenues that they themselves could create. If artists could initiate their own art works, why shouldn’t the art critics and historians initiate their own kinds of art history and criticism? It is a creative job and it has its own risks.

(Karan Johar)

Before concluding this essay, I would like to flag out one more issue that I have noticed in the field of cultural writing in India. We have excellent poets, novelists, political historians, musicians, filmmakers and geniuses in all other fields. They all interact well with their works and make critical assessments on each other. But these stalwarts, when they talk about visual arts (fine arts) they go by the standard views on it. Even the best feminists would celebrate the worst of feminist art when they turn their eyes to the visual scenario. The best of poets and writers would blindly speak good of the most retrogressive kinds of art. Those who take up cudgels against imperialism in other fields go and toast for the imperialist art. This also should change. The interdisciplinary approach in culture should be more discerning and decisive than casual praising and mutual embracing. We live in a time of degeneration in art and culture. It is high time that people wake up and write their own histories and criticisms.

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Civilizing Rituals: Guernica Stretcher in MoMA and the Works of Art in Our Cultural Institutions

September 9, 2016, 1:27 am

≫ Next: Life Style Wars and Audi Side View Mirror Conscientious Theft

≪ Previous: Who Killed Indian Art History and Critical Writings?

(MoMA find the Guernica Stretcher from its Storage)

Yesterday I happened to read an article in the MoMA, New York website. It is about an accidental finding of a stretcher which had initially held the legendary work ‘Guernica’ by Picasso. What surprised me was the way in which the topmost museum in the world celebrated the finding of this stretcher from its stock after almost half a century. The article meticulously traces the ‘journey’ of this stretcher and also scientifically proves how this was the original stretcher that held the famous Guernica together in place in the beginning. I am impressed by the efforts of the MoMA to make the very stretcher minus the work of art a thing of relevance itself and I am sure in the absence of the painting this stretcher would attract public attention now onwards. This obvious strategy of capitalist museum practice could make anything and everything into a work of art provided those accidental ‘findings’ once held some important work of art. It could be a plate, a crate, a nail , a rack, a railing, a vault, a wall, a storage, a corner, an attic, a trunk, a chest, a country house, a box or anything of that sort. It is one way to say that the association with a valuable signature could impart value and historical relevance to anything. The day is not far when people visit that particular room/gallery in MoMA where a naked stretcher is exhibited with a note, a headphone, a brochure, a handout qualifying it as the original stretcher of Guernica.

Should one be militantly against such capitalist art practices? What I mean by capitalist art practice is some art activity or art related activity that could produce excessive profit and false histories around it. Exhibiting or celebrating a stretcher could, in the long create a precedence of sorts and we could in future have a museum of stretchers and crates, where we could queue up to see what once held the great works of art. In the absence of the original great works of art, today the semblances do the job; either the originals are permanently missing but the acknowledgement of missing it by the authorities would cause a great rupture not only in the historical discourse but also in the economic discourse generated around the said works of art or they are kept in safe custody for the fear of depletion due to climatic exposures as well as for the fear of theft. Hence, we could say such dummy practices could eventually create a situation where people would see only the copies and never the originals. Though Walter Benjamin had said it in a different context, we could read it in the renewed context of seeing copies in the museums saying that while consuming a cultural product which already has got an approved history, it becomes less pertinent whether we are seeing/consuming the original or the copy. This could also be applicable in the case of a future museum of stretchers and storage materials of the works of art.

(Guernica by Pablo Picasso)

Carol Duncan in her ruminations on museum practices (Civilizing Rituals) has tangentially pointed out how revealing of findings could collapse the existing museum discourses that includes as I said before both historical discourses and economic discourses. Hence, the obfuscation of historical findings is a way to maintain status quo or reiteration of the false histories which have been already built around the works of art. It is time to read Duncan in a reverse format; we need to say that the new findings could also become a part of the new display without affecting the already existing histories and could become a point of comparison if not simple wonderment. What makes an eleven feet stretcher important is its original association with an illustrious painting, Guernica by Picasso. While MoMA creates its own provenance using historical, documentary and scientific evidences, there could be a parallel practice sparking off its journey; so many stretchers and containers would be found sooner than later.

This would lead to a situation what Guy Debord had emphasised in his essay the ‘Society of Spectacle’. In the process of spectacularization of anything and everything, the objects create meanings and values in their relationships with other objects rather than creating a meaning intrinsic to it. For example, a mango will be remembered when someone drinks a mango juice with its packaging saying clearly that no fruit pulp is involved in the making of it and it contains only artificial flavours. What stands between a mango and the fruit juice minus fruit pulp is a model like Katrina Kaif who drinks the juice as if she were having an orgasm. These three disparate images generate the idea of an original mango fruit and all our childhood memories associated with eating a ripe mango. Translating the very idea into the museum practice, we could say in the spectacularization process we no longer see a Picasso, a Ravi Varma, a Tagore, a Nandlal Bose, a Shergil, a Baij or a Souza but the crates and stretchers that once held their works. We would happy to have a museum of such auxiliary artefacts.

(Civilizing Rituals by Carol Duncan)

If MoMA is too strict in verifying the veracity of a stretcher, we Indians are too callous about it. I remember an experience I had when I got the opportunity to visit, flip through and assess the three to four thousand works in the storage of the Central Lalit Kala Academy a few years back. Stored in a damp and dark underground floor, the authorities did not even have proper lights to show me the works of art. One of the persons who accompanied me to the storage switched his die hard Nokia phone on, which had a good beam of white light. I need not say that I was witnessing the works of the doyen of Indian modern art rotting there, with their stretchers coming off and canvases folded, eaten by moths and termites and so on. This is where, despite all the theoretical positioning of us against the MoMA’s practice of celebrating a stretcher, we have to appreciate how respectful, strategic and proud they are about their works of art, their collection, their national pride and their national modern heritage.

We are a country that claims a cultural history of more five thousand years. The United States of America does not even have a history of five hundred years. Our cultural issues have been reduced to who eats what and who wears what. We have quick fix solutions come from the top leadership; it goes like this- we should not eat beef, the country will be alright. The visiting foreign girls should not wear skirts, if they do, they could be raped. Our cultural issues have been reduced to the protection of our geographical boundaries, it has been reduced to the digging of cricket pitches or preventing noted singers and professionals performing on Indian soil. Our biggest cultural issues have become cleaning up of Ganga, Kumbha Mela, Maha Aartis, Ganesh Festivals and all such religious practices. We as a people with a cultural heritage have become so callous that we do not even bother whether our Lalit Kala Academy is functioning or not.

(Central Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi)

When someone like me writes about these issues, they say that there is an element of ‘rant’ in it. Rant, according to the dictionary is an angry speech (which is not a hate speech). If it is not said in derogatory fashion (which often is), I am happy to be accused of being a rant because someone has to say these things. The national institutions like the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Lalit Kala Academy, the National Museum, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts and so on have been spending money to collect works of art or procure works for a long time (for around five decades to be precise). Except for what has been exhibited none knows what happened to all those collections in these institutions. Nobody know whether they are rotting or in good conditions. It is pertinent for these institutions to bring their collections for public perusal and create catalogues and documents so that we could understand what has been our modern visual cultural heritage or what has been the collecting parameters of these institutions. There will be a question then. If these works turn out to be trash and do not add grace to our cultural heritage, what could be done with them? I would say, we could discard them including the stretchers. But unfortunately, the important works of important artists too are rotting in these institutions, including the stretchers. Yes, we have a lot to learn from MoMA, how to do things in a museum and also how not to do things in a museum.

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Life Style Wars and Audi Side View Mirror Conscientious Theft

September 11, 2016, 8:57 am

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(Audi Side view mirror theft in Delhi, CCTV grab)

If someone wrenches away a part of my car (though I do not have one at present) I would feel bad. Any part of anything that we use is also a part of our own existence; our own body and soul. That’s why breaking ins in locked houses cause a lot of distress to people other than the loss of the valuables. I do not dare to talk about physical violations on both men and women by boors and authorities. It must be scarring people for the lives. However, in this small write up I plan to play the devil’s advocate. My trigger is one of the news items that I happened to read in today’s newspaper.

In South Delhi, within ten minutes seven high end cars lost their side view mirrors. The CCTV grabs show the auto-borne thieves striking within the gap of a few minutes in different places and wrecking havoc on the high cars like Audi, by taking their side view mirrors. A call made to the Audi showroom by one of the owners (of the cars) brought the prices of these mirrors into day light. A pair of it costs Rs.2.5 lakhs. It is a real loss for the owners. South Delhi being the rich part of the capital city often faces vandalism of different sorts. Taking away the car parts is not new to Delhi. Cannibalizing the stolen cars is an acknowledged grey market business and the authorities have not done much towards stopping it. My concern is not that.

(An Audi Car)

If a pair of side view mirrors (in that case any costly part of the car which cannot be locked away as it constitutes the external functions including the beautification of the car) that costs Rs.2.5 lakhs is stolen then we have to understand that there is a market elsewhere for it. Also commonsense tells us that the consumers of such stolen goods cannot be using low end cars for adding of anything like an Audi’s side view mirror to a low end car or an SUV would suddenly bring the public attention including that of the Police. Hence, we deduce the fact that the end users of these stolen goods are those people who use similar brand cars elsewhere, who in turn have lost their spare parts like side view mirrors.

A thief does not steal a car part just for fun. Yes, when it comes to the stealing of car logos (like the universally identifiable logos of the Mercedes Benz, Jaguar, Ford and so on) it is done at times for the heck of it. Hear the words of Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winning Turkish Novelist. In his new novel, ‘A Strangeness in My Mind’ as the story progresses, Pamuk makes his protagonist Mevlut talk these words, “You should not park here, the neighbourhood kids will steal the side view mirrors,” said Mevlut. “They’ll even take away the Ford Logo...They sell them to the spare parts dealers up the hill or wear them as necklaces. If it had been a Mercedes, they would have ripped the sign out long ago.” (Page 266).

(Orhan Pamuk, author)

I need not explain further why thieves take away high end car parts as Pamuk has explained it well in his novel. If it happens in Turkey, definitely it should be happening in any part of the world. I believe it is a fall out of the high end consumerism. As more and more people are taking the risk of buying high end cars in order to live a ‘different’ life, a parallel grey market is also developing along with it. What Arundhati Roy calls as ‘lifestyle war’ is what is making this new art of pilfering a rampant business. Anything that is mechanical has and needs spare parts. And all the mechanical devices are created for enhancing the life styles wars. That means the spare parts thus pilfered become the weapons of the new war and the thieves (they in Delhi are identified as Kaan Thod Gang, the ear severing gang, as they specialize in taking away the side view mirrors) the foot soldiers of the new war fare.

(Arundhati Roy, author and activist)

As I mentioned before, anybody would feel bad if something is stolen from their possession. But a car that worth more than a crore and its functional as well as decorative parts cost Rs.2.5 lakhs (which in fact is more than the price of a car that is offered by certain companies) automatically carries such risks in the public spaces. I am not supporting the theft but what I want to underline is the fact that the life style warfare would create its side characters who would always try to thwart the main focus of the war by creating parallel war zones which could produce profit for them and in a conscientious manner. The gang of thieves stopping a family in the middle of the night in a deserted patch of the road and raping the female members of the family is fundamentally different from the gangs that steal spare parts of the high end cars. The petty thieves who pick pockets or snatch chains are also different from the thieves who strike at the high end cars. They are like parallel operators in a life style war/market, whose acts are eventually legitimized by the grey market operators who further push the same spare parts to those high end car owners who had lost the spare parts in similar operations.

(a bracelet )

This kind of stealing is a conscience game. The thieves know that the owners of the cars are liable to be pilfered because they have excess money that’s why they buy such high end cars. They also know that most of the people who afford these kinds of cars use money earned by illegal means. Hence, the thieves think that stealing them is also a part of their social commitment to redistribute their money or property in a perverted way; by stealing or damaging their property. They find some kind of activism in it. While we say that any kind of stealing is a criminal act, the high end stealing always has a charm that’s why in the popular narratives the diamond thieves are always given the halo of a hero. There is a lot of skill and planning to do such theft; it involves smartness and agility. They are backed up by the invisible conscientious support of the populace that thinks that the owners of the high end cars should be punished in some way.

I will close this small essay by recounting a story told me by an artist friend. A man who was walking along the road stepped on a golden bracelet. He picked it up and looked around. After so much of deliberation this man went to a goldsmith and assessed the value of it. Once he realized that the bracelet was original, he thought of selling it and buying a chain for himself with the money. He did it. After that he kept on asking himself whether he did the right thing or not. He also thought of the person who had lost it and the pain he should be undergoing. So he went to a guru and asked him whether he did the right thing or not. Guru told him that he could wear the golden chain without any prick of conscience because a person who wears a golden bracelet or anklet must be a show off and he definitely must not have any financial liabilities for himself or in his family. So the bracelet was a part of the life style war for the owner of it. Hence, having it accidentally and converting it into a golden chain need not necessarily be an act of theft, the Guru assured. The man went away happily.

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Jeans and Ramdev: The False Idea of Swadeshikaran

September 12, 2016, 2:19 am

≫ Next: Ceasing to be Human Artists: Becoming Animal and Plant -Artists

≪ Previous: Life Style Wars and Audi Side View Mirror Conscientious Theft

(Jeans)

I am not an economist, nor am I a trade pundit. However, I am interested in the business news of certain kind. That’s why a small one column news item in today’s Indian Express page number nine caught my attention. It read: “Patanjali plans to launch ‘Swadeshi’ Jeans”. Patanjali is the business brand of the famous Yoga instructor, Baba Ramdev. Using his personal reach and charisma, Ramdev became one of the major players among the herbal medicine, food and cosmetic producers since 2004. A yoga instructor who doubles up as an entrepreneur and life style guru Ramdev has of late become an unacknowledged spokesperson for the Right Wing government at the centre, especially in the religious and moral matters of Indian political as well as socio-cultural life. The latest move of his to produce ‘Swadeshi’ jeans has to be seen in the right business perspective than the cultural one that the entrepreneur claims.

According to Ramdev, the CEO of the Patanjali group he is about to launch more than sixty big and small production units to produce jeans, apparels and foot wear products in order to compete with the multinationals. Also he emphasises that the youth of India ‘has been egging him to give them Swadeshi jeans’. True, when the youth of a country demands the business heads should respond to their needs. That’s why Mukesh Ambani’s Jio claims that it is going to help the 1.25 billion population of India by helping them to use internet data. Ramdev’s Swadeshikaran (nationalisation) is a similar attempt. Neither Mukhesh Ambani nor Ramdev is asked who exactly have asked them for their help in Swadeshikaran. As it is a nebulous population of India or the ‘youth’ of India, we should understand that it is a sort of volunteering of these businessmen holding the people of this country responsible for their business moves.

(Baba Ramdev with his Patanjali products)

Yes, our world has changed. We think that without smart phones and mobile internet data our daily life is not possible at all. The moment ‘net’ goes off we get panic attacks; some start shivering, showing withdrawal symptoms much worse than those shown due to the absence of drugs intake. But nobody seriously asks whether one could survive without mobile data or making telephone calls. If one seriously attempts to live without this ‘connectivity’, life becomes much easier, but we approach this view with a fair amount of cynicism. One could even say, ‘you are writing and posting it in your blog because you have internet connection’. But imagine those times that we lived without all these. Life is possible. If my mother happens to see a television news item that in Delhi it is raining heavily or there was an earthquake last night, she panics and calls me up. It is common with all mothers. But imagine those days when mothers waited for the inland letters or airmail letters. They waited patiently; we too waited patiently. That means, the ‘demand’ is not of the people but of the capitalists. By hook or crook, they need to generate profit and for that, people need to consume.

Swadeshikaran is not a new idea. Gandhiji used it effectively. He changed the lawyers’ club, which the Indian National Congress was (as Ramachandra Guha has pointed out in his latest book, ‘Democrats and Dissenters’) into a national movement of peasants and rural people. He stood for Swadeshikaran of everything including clothes and language (religion was one way of Swadeshikaran which would eventually yield bad results even Gandhiji had not foreseen in those days). At the same time Gandhiji was closer to the textile families like that of G.D.Birla (once again Ramachandra Guha becomes handy here as he said in an edit pager article last week how the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi approved the use of his image in the Jio advertisement without being corrupt himself but giving bad message to the lower level politicians) and this relationship was the basis of his Swadeshikaran of clothes pitting the populace of India against the Manchester imported clothes. Gandhiji knew that however the Indian population tried making khadi all by themselves using charkha they will have to depend on ‘swadeshi’ mill clothes that would come from the mills of Birla.

(Mahatma Gandhi)

Hence, a clever entrepreneur like Ramdev using ‘Swadeshikaran’ is just another smart move to cash in on the existing Hindu ambience of the country that demands more and more ‘swadeshikaran’ in every front including the socio-cultural life in India, ironically forgetting that the government is all for liberal Ex-Im policy and is aggressively promoting FDI (foreign direct investment) in all the possible fields. Ramdev overlooks it not because he does not understand it but because he knows that he would be a mismatch in the avenues where FDI is going to play a large role. Competing with a foreign company in their own quality terms would render Ramdev and his Patanjali a minor player in the given field. That’s why taking the unsubstantiated claim of the Indian youth asking for Swadeshi jeans Ramdev is all set for making Swadeshi jeans. The fact is, production of jeans is more or less an Indian monopoly in the Indian market. If at all there is a competition from outside, that is from China.

Out of the four or five main Denim producers in India (jeans cloth is called denim) Gujarat based companies like Arvind Mills and Nandan Mills are the business leaders. Besides catering to the Indian demands, they make a 20 to 25 per cent of denim export mainly to the Middle East countries. In a country where more than sixty five per cent of the population is below 35, one could imagine the number of the denim product users. To cater to the demands of an average 65 crore people in the country we have only four or five main denim producers. According to the heads of these companies, they feel the growth potential moving forward thanks to the new cultural opening of the country to the international trends. Jeans once was considered to be a working class clothing. But when it came to India during the years of protected economy only the elite could afford to wear it. Within ten years of the liberalization of the Indian economy jeans became a cultural product which could be afforded by a larger population. The market is driven by competitive pricing and the companies like Arvind Mills besides making franchise brands (like Levi Strauss, Wrangler, Lee and so on), it also has introduced affordable Indian brands like Flying Machine, New Port, Ruf and Tuf etc.

(Historian and author, Ramachandra Guha)

That means whatever denim brands that we wear today in India are not imported. They are home produced therefore an argument of swadeshikaran of a mass product which is already home made is almost absurd. But the consumer population would believe Ramdev because his other products have been Indian made and created with a particular cultural ethos behind it. Swadeshikaran is just another slogan which would enhance the profit margin of the Patanjali company. Interestingly, Ramdev is not only aiming at the Indian denim market but also the markets in other Asian and African countries. The irony again is that while saying this Ramdev forgets that there could be possibilities of same nationalist resistances from those countries that would find these products as foreign import. But Ramdev will laugh all the way to bank because as we are not resisting the Chinese products or other imported items only because of competitive pricing, if Ramdev could sell his denim products in competitive prices, then definitely the Asian and African denim markets are going to be his. But Swadeshikaran of denim is a false claim because it is in way already is a Swadeshi product.

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Ceasing to be Human Artists: Becoming Animal and Plant -Artists

September 13, 2016, 9:31 am

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Poetry fails, art fails, dance fails and music fails. When all these fail human beings fail for they are the makers of all those art forms. Once they fail to create them out of fear, out of lethargy and out of a sense of uselessness the world becomes two dimensional. Human beings slowly turn into animals, mute, obedient and remote. They move away from the mainstream society which is formed by a group of people who have lost their art and sensitivity for art. Their failure lies in their inability to see those people who make art and listen to the silent clues that these art forms give. They even have not noticed that the artists, poets, dancers and musicians, and all other creative people have gone away from the crowds. They have gone somewhere else. They have gone to become animals.

Animals, birds and creatures are pure beings. So are the plants. The former ones move and the latter one stay. Whether they move or stay, they teach us a way of living; living without hurting others. Animals do not predate if they are not hungry. They do not hunt for fun. Plants live on inflicting least hurt to others. Both animals and trees intermingle in a beautiful heaven of co-existence. Human beings are also animals; they move and the only problem is that they think. The more they think the more they think about their own well being. So they hunt and they hunt to eat and hunt for fun too. Artists are animals by nature. But slowly they also changed their nature. They became human beings who hunt for fun.

Artists who want to retain their animal nature somehow have become plants to day. They live silently, drinking sunlight and leaving out the best of things possible for the survival of other beings. They tend not to hurt anything around. Plants that grow in home gardens are not real plants; they live there because they do not want to hurt the people who have brought them there. Those are happy plants that live here and there without any order but keeping an internal rhythm with the nature. Plants and trees that are tended in the nurseries are not real plants yet they are there because they do not have the ability to walk off. They look at the trees around and keep on talking to them. As they do not move, they remain constant companions until they are taken away in cars to the floors that move towards heaven and away from earth.

Animal-artists are the plant artists. They walk silently with a sketch pad, a note book and a flute along the paths the mainstream people have grown tired. The mainstream people have gone to the six lane asphalt roads where carnivals take place, in the night clubs where loud noise, meaningless words, wild gyrations and psychedelic lights make them weirder than they have entered earlier. Animal-artists who have by now become plant natured sit under trees, take out their sketchbooks and draw; poets sit by the side of the river and write, musicians walk into the dark forests and play flutes for the beasts that hide inside, dancers move along the seashores, watching sunsets and sunrises.

Good artists are animals and plants. We have a lot to learn from them. We have to become them. We have to become the other so that the othering process would stop at some point. When everyone tries to become an other, a beast or a plant then there will not be persons with religious identities. When the need to gather diminishes, the need to emphasise identity also recedes. Animals do not tell their names or flaunt their religions, nor do the plants because they do not have banks and profits. They do not run businesses and invest in stock markets. They do not participate in auctions either. They do not sell their ninety per cent of the stocks to foreigners and retain ten percent and still control the aesthetics of a country. Animals do not run galleries. Plants do not collect paintings. But they adore each other. They drink from the same stream and never pollute it before they leave. So it is pertinent to become animal-artists and plant-artists, and go and live in forests and deserted places. To be a mainstream human being is Hell.

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Keeping Patrons at Bay: A Tip for Present and Future Artists

September 13, 2016, 8:19 pm

≫ Next: Nefertiti in the South West Coast

≪ Previous: Ceasing to be Human Artists: Becoming Animal and Plant -Artists

(Dr.Philip and Dusty Walkom-Art Patrons- for representational purpose only)

Recently a young artist friend asked me why artists who start off as radicals slowly become a part of the establishment. It was not for the first time that I was confronting such a question nor was the phenomenon entirely new for me. I have seen so many artist friends becoming the part of the socio-political and economic system through their cultural agency. They fail to understand that system/society is something that always goes with the power centres. When it operates hands in glove with the power centres it cannot be radical. But the only question that remains is what is radical or how to be radical. I would say anything that operates from outside the norms of the society is radical and to be one, one has to simply operate from outside the system. That does not mean the ones who are radical are basically anarchists nor do they propagate anti-social stance in the society. They are like the gypsies who make war against the system from the fringes not with the hope that one day they would overthrow it but with the simply aim to keep it destabilize so that it would not become authoritarian.

To be a radical is a difficult proposition these days because we live in a society where Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Maoism and such erstwhile radical ‘isms’ are either contained via using coercive tactics including military force and societal perks. We also live in such societies that misinterpret such ‘isms’ as alien ideologies that works against the basic idea of capitalist property/prosperity therefore it becomes pertinent for them to oppose all these ideologies. Taking off from a fair amount of ignorance about social systems, ideologies that drive them and also the counter ideologies that aspire for common good even of the last man in the remotest area of the earth, the members of the mainstream society think that those people who sport a beard or even coming from certain geographical areas naturally are Socialists or Communists. They just do not understand the history of Socialism in India and also they fail to understand the fact that socialism was the ideological basis of the Congress that ruled the country for almost half a century. With globalization, the mainstream societies have almost decided that anything that appears to be slightly deviating from the main tracks used by the social engine, are radical therefore they should be shot down.

(Problem Area: Artists too aspire for this life)

Calling names is the easiest way to shoot down the radicals and rebels, a tribe of people which moving fast towards extinction. However, I feel that their tribe will not die out so fast without giving some sleepless nights for the power centres because even if in a very limited and almost negligible proportion youngsters are coming to join this tribe of radicals. But again the question comes back why after a certain stage they become a part of the mainstream society and almost become happy to be the cogwheels of the engine of power that leads the society towards the so called development. It happens mainly because as Ramachandra Guha points out, our writers are part of the power centres or they aspire to be so. How does it happen, we need to ask again and again. The answer to this question comes from a simple understanding of the idea of success. Those people in any profession or working in field of life attach the idea of success with materialistic gains, financial opulence, social presence and the resultant power. Unfortunate it is that even the artists themselves attach the idea of success to these markers making themselves no different from property dealers, land developers, corrupt officers, engineers, doctors and other well paid professionals who work for both the public and private establishments.

When success quotient and success parameters are one and the same for both the artists and other people where exactly one would place the difference? An artist who aspires for a high end apartment through the selling of his/her works then becomes fundamentally no different from an IT Professional who aspires for the same using his salary and perks. If everyone is seeing success as the same thing then whatever one does would not make any qualitative difference. How some of the musicians and writers or even visual artists who could keep themselves off from this trap and still remain radicals is an interesting aspect to probe. They could be detached from this idea of success while enjoying all the fruits of it only because they do not attach their success to the ideas, ideals and ideology of the people who consume their creative products. They are not swayed by their patrons, in short. They are neither influenced by the patron’s ideas in their creativity nor do they succumb to the pressures of the state to create something to its wish, that means against the wishes of the creative people. To gain this position one needs to be extremely firm in their creative life and should slightly shift the focus off the idea of success and redefine it considerably.

(Fidel and Ali- Eternal Radicals)

I would never say that an artist should live in penury and struggle forever in abject conditions only because he/she happened to be an artist and a radical at the same time. I would never say that. I am emphatic on this because personally, being a creative artist, I do not want to live in penury or struggle. I do not thing that my creativity comes from my personal struggles. On the contrary I believe that my creative faculties would find new firmaments to fly if I keep the parameters of my success away from the financial gains or the social acceptance I get through my creative works. The onus is now both on the artist and the patron. As far as consumption of creative works is concerned a patron is all the more important. A patron by virtue of his financial freedom is always a person who stands closer to the power centres, which could be coarse or refined, but yet keeping his sensibilities much refined and sophisticated. For various reasons, the patron should have his closeness to the power centres and he would always create situations to perpetuate this idea of power in currency. But at the same time, thanks to his refined sensibilities, he would be interested to see and possess creative works that goes fundamentally against his own ideologies. A patron always is an affective radical. He buys the radical best and become a part of the different thinking, while keeping his fundamental believe in the system intact.

Here the artists could lose their track. The patron will be very good to an artist because what he buys is not the art alone from the artist, but his sense of radicalism also. His sense difference is what makes his art more alluring for the patron. It is a weapon so powerful to sharpen the aggressive sensibilities of the patron in the larger arenas of his own exposure in terms of business and profit making. Having the possession of the radical culture in his own vaults and walls is more important than running an art college or college for ‘producing’ culture. But the moment the artists who are patronised by this patron start believe in his ideologies, his attachments, his life style, his parameters of success and so on, the artists would slowly lose their sense of radicalism therefore freedom. Artists need patrons, but artists should believe in their patron’s life style or ideology for the simple reason that the patron himself does not believe in the ideologies and radicalism practiced by the artists. What he looks for is the emblematic radicalism as expressed in the works of art created by the artists. What happened to our artists is that by replicating the life styles of the patrons they lost the edge of their radicalism and lost the track of their art. They ceased to be humanitarians and environmentalists. They became gatherers of wealth the way their patrons are and became identity mongers by taking memberships in the high societies.

(Poet Kumaran Asan by Shibu Natesan- Stand Alone)

One thing has to be remembered at this stage. A patron’s job and an artist’s job are two different things. Their lives are two different things; they cannot meet. Any meeting forcefully forged would be temporary because the patrons are the part of the power(ful) systems and the artists basically the people who operate from outside such systems. The moment artists become a part of that system, the patrons slowly lose the interest in them and they would look for other fresher artists and if at all they would wine and dine with the successful artists in parties and other avenues it would be just as to hold them as trophy creative people whom they have won over to their side simply using power of money. Most of the artists today are the people who have gone astray in the case of their relationship with the patrons. In their efforts to replicate their patrons’ lives they have lost their own lives and identities. They have become artists who make art not any more art of the universe that could make people go weak on their knees and shed tears of joy.

Once again I need to emphasise that the artists who want to be remain radicals should not replicate the life styles of their patrons provided they want to be a part of the system by lobbying for Padma awards, Rajya Sabha memberships and so on. If patrons are ready to buy the works of the artists, they should take the money, give the work and live a life of their own. Most of the artists in their efforts to replicate the lives of the upper class and that of the patrons have lost their souls and sense of being artists completely. Today they have also become status quoists with easily hurting egos. An artist would be noticed, noted and made eternal in the history only when it is proved beyond doubt that he or she stayed away from the system and lived a life of difference and created a life of their own. Artists are those people who make art for themselves and also for the universe, for animals and plants too. They are not the people who make art for patrons. Patrons are the people who seek art and difference. Let patrons live their lives and let the artists live their lives without mixing up the idea of success in pure materialistic terms. On that day our art scene once again would become more interesting and flourishing than it is today.

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Nefertiti in the South West Coast

September 14, 2016, 10:32 am

≫ Next: Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal Holding Works of Art Hostage: Artists Form Gallery Fail to Protest

≪ Previous: Keeping Patrons at Bay: A Tip for Present and Future Artists

(Photograph by Shibu Natesan. This poem is inspired by this picture)

For centuries I have been standing here

While my sister in the land of pyramids

Made herself eternal inside the tombs

She never looked straight though powerful

I too do not after these many years on this shore

Covered from head to toe with a shame untold

But with eyes opened to the world

Mind opened to the dreams and gardens

Of heaven and the passions of hell

With burning thoughts I stand still here

In a silhouette, witnessing the setting suns

Day after days, seeing stars shooting up

Lazy moons growing and waning, listlessly

They came by ships, with mighty horses

Became one with the land and the language

Fused blood into blood in solemn ceremonies

Creating many like me; we were happy to be.

Later, while the lightness of eternity taking

My sister in the mysterious pyramid tombs

To the world’s great treasure troves for

Scholars and artists to admire and love her

I stood here with no scholarship or knowledge

But only with a vision gifted to me by my eyes

Burning the world before me silently yet

Determined to be submissive to one and all

Letting the world to fight on my body

To decide on whether I cover head to toe

Or completely naked in harems abundant

I stand here, with children running around

And waves lashing against the shores

I stand like a rock at the cliff before a frozen fall

Neglected and at times wondered at, desired

And discarded quite often till you came and

Clicked this picture and made me eternal

Like my sister in the tombs who has travelled

The world with her side glance and now me too

With you and your brother, to the word, to eternity.

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Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal Holding Works of Art Hostage: Artists Form Gallery Fail to Protest

September 16, 2016, 12:26 am

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≪ Previous: Nefertiti in the South West Coast

(Indian Marriage)

As an Indian let me use an analogy which is close to my cultural consciousness to underline the relationship between an art gallerist or an art expo organiser and a work of art being sent to him/her/them for exhibition; it is of a marriage in a traditional Indian family. Here the artist is the father/mother of the work of art/daughter whose hand is given in trust. Deeds are written and signed and witnesses are brought in. The whole world is informed of this marriage through a reception ceremony or the wedding function itself with fantastic feasts. As far as works of art are concerned the deeds brokered and signed between the gallerist/organizer and the artist/father/mother. Exhibition opening party is the wedding ceremony and the post-opening is the fabulous feasts thrown to honour the bride and bridegroom as well as the guests. In this whole affair, the role of a curator is that of a marriage broker who cannot be held for anything that follows in the married life of the couple or their relatives for the role of a broker ends once the match is fixed and solemnized, and the stipulated amount for ‘fixing’ the marriage is handed over to the broker/s.

I went into this long preamble drawing an analogy between art exhibitions and the Indian marriages because recently my beloved expatriate artist friend Waswo X Waswo informed me of an ongoing debate/rather a possible legal tussle between the administration of the reputed art organization, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal and a whole lot of artists from various parts of India, incidentally led by Waswo for all his good intentions (It is to be noted that while most of the Indian artists succumbed to the pressures of the head load workers’ unions in Kerala in 2015 March towards the end of the second edition of the KMB to cough up exorbitant amounts for transporting the works from the sites, it was Waswo who protest by breaking his works of art which in fact sparked off a series of cultural debates in Kerala. In the year 2011, sculptor K.S.Radhakrishnan had taken a similar firm stance towards the trade unions in Trivandrum, Kerala and finally the Labour Department Secretary sent him a letter of apology along with a cheque for the amount that he had paid). Bharat Bhavan was planning to organize the 7^th Bharat Bhavan Biennale which was to be held in April 2013. There was entry fee (non-refundable and irrespective of selection) and also it was agreed up on that the returning of the works was the responsibility of the organization. The organization failed to send the works, if at all they sent, they did it in ‘to pay’ mode forcing unsuspecting artists to pay up to the couriers. Aggrieved artists have now come together in a social media platform, Gallery Fail, created by Waswo. A cursory look at the page proves how many skeletons and worms are there in the cupboards and cans of the art organizations.

(Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal)

The story, as evident from the facebook page as well as from our own personal experiences is not new at all. Perhaps, it is a pioneering effort of the artists to raise an issue in a given platform, surprisingly not shying away from naming and shaming the people involved in such acts of ‘betrayal’, means not returning the works of the artists after the use. Now let us analyse this phenomenon and also see how exactly this practice of not returning the works might have originated (perhaps, in any art scene). For an artist, many decades before it became a full time profession which paid, his/her works of art were the love of their creative lives which demanded the places for exposition. Hence, showing the works were along with a brochure was far more important than selling those works and making a living out of it. It had happened not only in the urban areas but also in the town and rural areas. Artists lived, worked and exhibited in all these places. However, when they brought these works to exhibit in urban centres like Lalit Kala Akademi and AIFACS in Delhi or Jehangir Gallery in Mumbai or the Artists’ Centre in Kolkata, they expected some kind of sales and most of the sales happened on the last days of the show, which in turn were not really sales but ‘clearing sales or distress sales’. Artists from the previous generations know what I am talking about (even some of the present generation artists too know this). Dealers, collectors and other art people swoop down during the last days of the show and make hard bargaining with the artists and take the works for one fourth of the quoted prices. Artists, in a highly distressed conditions were forced to make clearance sales or in case of no(n)-sale, they would consign the works with some city based galleries who might have already made their rounds and done some agreement on consignment with the artists. That means, most of the artists left their works either by selling them for throw away prices or leaving them as consignments, trusting the gallerists not only for the money but also for the safe return of them after the consignment period. One could imagine, in those days with snail mail and land phoning as the only ways of communication, most of the artists might have lost track of their works due to the disinterestedness of the gallerists or their sheer disappearance. Yet another lot would think of collecting them in the coming years which perhaps would never come. And still another group would think of those works with a sense of relief feeling that they could clear their small living spaces of these works.

Many art dealers, gallerists and art people have made a little money out those works or in rare chances might have made huge fortunes provided the said artist became a hot property in the later years. In most cases, these works find their ways to the city’s famous (notorious too) second hand markets as junk, when the gallerists themselves clear their spaces and ‘divest the bad stock’. With the arrival of professionalism especially after the globalization process of Indian economy, well spelt contracts have been written and moreover mutual trusts are developed between artists and galleries or art organizations. That means, when the artist gives the works in consignment to an organizer or to a gallery, the legal system of the country is only partially mentioned or the accountability of this deed is limited to the parties who enter into the contract; that means, there is no social contract as in the case of a marriage. When profit is made out of works of art and when it is shared between the organizer/gallerist and the artist/s it is not made into public (only auction houses make the amounts transacted public). Only when the contract is breached and words are not kept, the artists become aggrieved parties. When, the artist knows that the gallery is still power and there is a possibility of it bringing benefits in future, then he/she would keep quite on what happened to their previous contracts. In the case of Bharat Bhavan and Lalit Kala Akademy, they are not profit making organizations nor do they offer a sales profit to the artists (at times they do. In the case of Bharat Bhavan, it is alleged that they have taken Rs.500/- as entry fee. Considering the number of artists applied, it must be a huge amount), they take the courage to express it in public, which we see in Gallery Fail facebook page.

(Waswo x Waswo)

Had there been no money involved in this transaction between the Bharat Bhavan and the artists, I would not have seen it as a major offence instead I would have thought about it as a bureaucratic callousness which India is famous for. Here, as the organization has promised sending back the works to the artists on its own expenses and also the organization has made huge money in the form of entry fee/application fee, the failure of the organization to return the works to the artists reeks of corruption, which has to be probed legally. I believe that Bharat Bhavan is an autonomous organization yet it is not beyond the laws of the land. There should be a ministerial level probe on to this and it should be immediately brought into the notice of the state authorities and also to the notice of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. Public accountability of the galleries and organization is still a thing which is not thought of in our country. Perhaps in the case of establishments like LKA, people have lost interest in them completely and whatever happens none in the artists community even looks at that side (the best example is that the Central LKA galleries are locked up for the last one month and nobody in Delhi art seems to have even taken notice of it). As we lack a clear cultural policy for our country and if at all some policy moves are seen here and there, due to heavy politicking, always such positions of decision making are handled by incompetent political bigwigs or cultural people with political connections.

Here I need to quote Ramachandra Guha extensively. In his latest book titled ‘Democrats and Dissents’ he writes in the already famous chapter, ‘Eight Threats to Freedom of Expression in India’: “I come now to my eighth and final threat to freedom of expression. This is constituted by careerist or ideologically driven writers..... “

“In India tragically, too many writers, scholars, artists and editors identify with a single party or even with a single politician, this association leading to the suppressing of facts or the twisting of opinions. This betrayal-a harsh word that seems entirely justified here-occurs all across the spectrum....”

“Party affiliations also lead to selective outrage, whereby writers and artists focus on some threats to freedom of expression while ignoring others. The left-wing group SAHMAT campaigned vigorously on M.F.Husain’s behalf, but stayed strangely silent on the treatment of Taslima Nasrin by the Left Front Government in West Bengal....”

“....The Prime Minister himself does not appear to think that intellectuals, writers and artists contribute much to society, and this hostility to independent thinking and thinkers goes right down the line.” (pages 36, 37, 39)

(Ramachandra Guha, Historian and Author)

What Guha says is absolutely is the reason for the callousness shown by the galleries and art organizations that have close affinities with politicians or political parties. When the Prime Minister himself thinks that anybody could head the intellectual organizations, then things cannot be different in this country. Look at the artists who have responded this issue of non-returning works by the organizations. Even for the sake of expressing solidarity, the leading artists in this country have not responded to the issue because if they do their associations with the galleries and the government could be jeopardized. However, I feel that it is pertinent raise this issue in all the possible platforms and eke out a response from the authorities and whoever is responsible for doing such callous act or for the shoddy treatment of the artists and the works of art. The major reason for most of the big wigs keeping off from this issue is mainly because that they feel that the entry to the 7^th Bharat Bhavan Biennale was done willingly by the artists and the ensuing problems should be handled individually because the contract is between them and the organizations. They are justified in believing so because their agreement with their galleries and organizations are absolutely professional and they are never cheated or betrayed by the organizations and galleries.

So far, this issue remains the issue of those artists who are not ‘established’ personalities. Anything could be done to these people because nobody is going to hold anybody accountable. The artists are so dispersed in locations and so disparate in tastes that no two artists are going to find a common cause to fight for, the organizations know. This state of things should be changed. There should be some kind of accountability and legal holding for both these artists and the galleries and organisations. Experts should think of it further.

(Gallery Fail in Facebook)

I will close long piece of article by recounting a personal experience regarding the non-return of the works of art. In 2012, I was the Project Director of the now defunct United Art Fair, Delhi. In this high energy program, young artists in India participated as if it was their own Art Fair. They all had entered a personal agreement with the management in which I was not a signatory. Due to many reasons, while the UAF brand was established it could not make a commercial profit. The management failed to send the works back to the artists (by the time I had resigned from the organization). Many young artists accused me of not taking responsibility of giving their works back. Technically and practically it was impossible for me as a person to coax the management to do the needful. The failure of the UAF to live up to the artists expectations as far as their works were concerned damaged the reputation of the UAF and it couldn’t survive a second edition (reasons are many but it is not the occasion to discuss all that). Time and again I have been asked whether it was my duty to send the works back to the artists. I have the works that had come to my shows even fifteen years back. The artists have never demanded them. I never had any reason to keep them with me. But fifteen years back, in the absence of an art market, curator driven shows were done in agreement with the artists who had promised to take the works back personally once the exhibition is done. If at all I have a few old rolls somewhere in my studio, they are all willingly left by the artists.

Let me go back to the marriage analogy. In the case of Bharat Bhavan, it looks like a broken marriage. The mutual trust has been broken. The girl has not come back to the parents’ house. She is languishing somewhere in the limbo in the bridegroom’s house. To make matters worse, the bridegroom’s parents are asking money to send the girl back. It amounts to dowry harassment. It should be tackled legally. Now, what would a marriage broker do in a divorce case?

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I am migrating to....

September 17, 2016, 2:12 am

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...Nowhere. I am migrating to nowhere because I do not have a country to go. My passport says that I am an Indian and my cultural consciousness says that I am a universal human being. Vasudhaiva Kudumbakam is one of the Upanishadic teachings that I had made a part of myself when I was in my high school. While studying the life and work of Dr.Moshagundam Visweswaraiya I came across this Sanskrit phrase and was fascinated. Further studies in the poetry of the ancient Poet Triumvirate in Kerala affirmed this belief that I was a universal citizen. If I say that the kind of nationalism prevalent in this country does not excite me and on the contrary goes against my fundamental beliefs as a universal citizen, they would immediately say that I should go to Pakistan.

Religion is what divides the Indians into different ideological factions. Politics comes later. Even the political parties want the people to be divided along the religious lines so that they could be added to their vote banks. I would say the people are fools as they think that belonging to a particular religion would make them more nationalistic than the nationalists really are. We, the fools are fighting over the water allocation legally done by the court of law in this country. One so called ‘Hindu’ state is fighting another so called ‘Hindu’ state. When it comes to water and other natural resources, we cease to be nationalists. Go to Kerala and try to stop eating beef. There will be a backlash to the Gau Rakshkas. One religion cannot hold people together. In India Hindus fight Hindus and all over the world, Muslims fight Muslims in the name of Shias, Sunnis, Salafists, Wahabis and so on; the Christians fight Christians for their various denominations including the Catholics and Protestants.

I would like to go to a country where religion is no longer a deciding factor. I know that in India religion is not going to fade away if one wishes it to be so. I have heard that there are European countries that are selling the former churches to make them malls and museums so that they could use the real estate for better economic purposes. But in India, on a daily basis we are creating more and more places of worship so that we could develop real estate business around that. Even if you want to run a small tea shop, the best way is to erect an idol and start worshipping it. You could be a tea seller doubled up as part time priest so that your way side establishment will not be knocked down by the authorities. An unused idol could by default create a major centre of worship today in this country.

A country that is still lacking in proper education and health care is aiming to take back in time and establish a golden time where every citizen in this country would travel on horseback or ride chariots and fight using primitive weapons, killing the brothers and sisters for land and property. We are bringing the Sadhus and Sannyasis who are worldly wise and have oratorical skills or absolute stupidity to support their claims to the seats of law and policy making and learn from there while we say that we are making board room negotiations with businessmen and policy makers from abroad. In this totally confusing state of affairs people are left more and more anchorless so that they could take refuge in beliefs that perhaps would not help them at all in their lives.

People are supposed to have economic freedom and the freedom to live a fearless life in all the walks. But in this country where religion has become a parameter to decide anything and everything things have gone wrong. The people are opiate and opinionated; they are intoxicated by ideology and are propagandist in nature. I do not want to live in this country because this country says that anything that is not Hindu in ideology or anybody who is a Muslim or from a Muslim country or even from a foreign country has to be doubted and disputed aggressively in all the possible fronts. So I want to go to some country where my religion would never be a hurdle in my life.

Hence, I searched in google for getting tips to migrate. And each country has a set of rules of immigration. I searched for those countries which are not really lucrative and are less populated because of extreme climate. There are certain initial online tests just to know whether you are eligible for migration at all. I confronted the questionnaire and answered all those questions. To my surprise I found myself to be unwelcome to most of the countries that I tried to migrate to. My education and my experiences do not count there at all. My age and health condition would further prevent me from being a migrant elsewhere. That means I am a prisoner in a country where I am not really happy to live forever.

Why and how did it happen to me or people like me? We would like to go to anywhere and would like to live. But our age, health and education are not counted anymore or they become a sort of hurdle in our migration. Had I been a skilful worker like welder or an IT professional or a doctor or engineer, perhaps they would have considered me. But I am none of those. I am art historian, an intellectual, a thinker, an anti-mainstreamer and so on therefore I am not welcomed in any part of the world. In my own country too my skills are not needed because art is something that has been becoming less important in the general lives of the people, let alone the debates pertaining to art. So that means, a professional like me is a useless person for the state because I am not teaching in a university nor am I working in a government department. I am not working in any of the private sector establishments and I am not visibly contributing to the general economy of the country. That means I am a useless person as far as the state is concerned. Above all I want the state to strip itself off of all the religious garbs, which is an atrocious demand from a useless person. I should be mad.

Now, I find that being mad is the only way to find my migration to other locations possible. A mad person has to be consigned to asylums because he/she is a danger to the mainstream society. They think differently and act differently and at times their madness could be infectious and influential. It could even make a lot of people mad. So keeping such mad people within the state could be almost like inviting danger to the state and the normal people. Hence, the state has the responsibility to cast away such people to distant lands where they would live, rot and finally die. Foucault talks about ship of fools in his famous book, Madness and Civilization, where ships are used to transport the mad, diseased, physically challenged and deranged to the far off islands so that they would create their own communities of lawlessness and perish there.

I am a migrant to nowhere because nobody wants me in their space. The religious fundamentalists could arrange a free ticket for me and people like me to Pakistan. But do Pakistan want people like us because that is also not different from India in political and religious thinking. That means I am living a life in prison. I cannot go anywhere because I am not welcome anywhere. No country including India wants my expertise or even my thought process. So the best way is to keep silence and live a migrant’s life in one’s own body and soul. Having understood this long back, I am living that today.

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The Two Worlds that the Artists Inhabit

September 24, 2016, 9:16 pm

≫ Next: Think Before you Paint a God: Indian Artists’ Gods and the History of their Evolution

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We dwell in two worlds; one inside and one outside. I have not just stated an earth shattering truth. I have said what everyone knows. However, if you ask what are these worlds, most of us would look here and there or give the readymade answer instantly; inside world is spiritual world and outside world is the real world. The romantics among them would further say that the inside world is the one where we hide ourselves and live our secret lives, play out our fantasies, pose all what we are not, cry to our hearts’ fill and outside world is where we live pretending that everything is alright. Interestingly, barring a few most of us have not reconciled with the internal and the external worlds. They remain as two different strange lands never to be bridged by anything.

Many people are still confused about the internal and the external worlds. They think that if you are a person who has realized the internal world, a spiritually enlightened person or a hardcore romantic, then one does not have anything to do with the external world. Similarly, those who delve deeply into the worldly matters leave the affairs of the internal world to those ‘enlightened’ men and women and believe that an occasional visit to them would be enough for them to satisfy their urge to realize an internal world, if at all such an urge exists anywhere. Seeing the number of people thronging around the sannyasis and spiritual gurus of both the genders I am reassured that the urge to realize the internal world even for the diehard worldly beings is so high that they could spend any amount of time, money and energy to do that. All of them unfortunately think that realization of the internal world is directly proportionate to the amount of time and energy (of course money too) one could spend on such matters.

I have a friend who constantly worries about his artistic growth and family life. Way into his forties, he feels that his time is over and the youngsters as well as his contemporaries have made it; he is the only one who has been left out. My friend, who is a freelancer, goes to his studio every morning, work religiously and he gets chances to exhibit his works in various shows, besides having opportunities to participate in workshops and camps held in different parts of the country. When he unpacks the bundles of woes before me I often ask him why he was so worried about his life and works. According to him, the others have ‘arrived’ in the art scene and he has not yet. I realize from his talks that for him ‘arrival’ means a sort of success enjoyed by the artists in terms of recognition of the works among the peer groups as well as among the younger artists, and is obviously iced with the selling of the works. To put it simply, what leaves him dissatisfied constantly is the fact that his inability to turn his works into liquid cash. In other words, he is worried about money.

This friend of mine is a disciplinarian; he goes regularly for meditation camps and does meditation for an hour every day. I ask him why he does meditation. He tells me that he does that for keeping an internal balance and to realize the inner world. I understand internal balance as calmness or the much talked about word, ‘peace’. What about the inner world? I quiz him further and he comes out clear by saying that inner world is the world where he could live his life. I ask him about the complexion of the world and how does it feel? He tells me that there in the inner world he lives an ideal life, creates his art and just does not worry about whether people see it or buy it. He is happy in that world where nothing worries and he floats in a sea of fulfilment. He also says that in that one hour of he understands that nothing matters; even his happiness does not matter. There is no need to prove anything, gain anything, lose anything and it is pure bliss. And do you like it in that way, I ask. Definitely, he answers. “I like it in that way.” In that state of mind aren’t you worried about your family, your wife and kids? “No. Nothing is indispensable. Everything would take care of itself.” Are you sure, I ask. “Yes,” he says. “But,” he continues, “But when I come out of it after an hour, everything remains the same. I am back in the same s**t.”

If meditation helps for an hour to be what you are and throws you back to the garbage after that hour, then does it fundamentally differ from the alcohol consumption and drug abuse? Logically speaking, any intoxicate would help you to forget the worldly woes for some time. This sort of alcoholic abuse has been given cultural sanction via popular novels and films. A spurned lover or a man who failed in life could always turn to alcohol or drugs to ‘forget’ his sorrows. His actions are justified and to certain extent sympathized by the public. He is a poor man and the ‘world’ is the villain. Meditation and medication do the same. Those who go for meditation are the people who have been wronged by life and it is important for them to seek balance and peace to continue with their lives. The imagery that comes to my mind is that of a public place that the municipality worker cleans regularly in the morning only to be littered by the people throughout the day and night till the cleaner comes back at the appointed hour next day. If we cannot keep our minds clean throughout the day and night there is no point in doing meditation or holding the bottle.

As human beings, everyone lives in two different worlds; it is already said outset of this article. What I am going to elaborate here is the nature of those worlds. The internal world that one claims to habit is neither a spiritual realm that needs special exercises to be realized nor a definable one where one’s movement could be clearly chartered. It is an ideal realm. And ideal is thought about or imagined only when a non-ideal is seen, lived and experienced. Hence, we cannot be sure that ideal precedes the non-ideal, which could also be called mundane or the mundane precedes the ideal. According to the Greek Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, the ideal is already there in the divine realm and man’s job is to imitate it. It is slightly against our soonya theory, the theory of nothingness. There is nothing to precede or succeed therefore there is nothing to be emulated. Whatever be the case, whether an idea exists in the divine realm or nothing is there including the divine realm, a human being could live an internal life, by which one means which is not external and palpable, without all what he/she thinks limiting him/her in the external world. With all the limitations erased (which is not possible in the external world) what one lives inside one’s own being is the ideal world which is inside.

It is so interesting that we always say inside and outside. This binary exists because we contrast the external world, the world that we see, live in and experience, with the thoughts generated by it. Where do these thought originate? We say, in our minds (the scientific one would say, in the brain). There are thoughts which are felt not really thought about, and we say that is originated in our heart. When we know that as biological entities both brain and heart cannot show us proofs that they generate thoughts (brain mapping and related scientific fields have made attempts to see thoughts as ‘image’ entities and energies, which in fact could be quantified), we imagine them as streams of words or pictures because we are trained in these two systems or structures of comprehending the world we live in. Thoughts cannot be touched, tasted and smelt; but it could be seen and heard (muted hearing). That means whatever we consider as ideal world inside us are either created of words or images. And living in there means we live in two structures, linguistic as well as pictorial structures. Together they give birth to the three dimensional sensation of a life lived inside.

And what is this ‘inside’? Technically speaking, anything that is inside the outer skin (epiderm) is ‘inside’ for a human being. Ironically, that internal world which is manifested by two structures and is felt as an ideal world without any societal limitations, is neither muscles and bones nor veins and blood. That means what we imagine as the ideal world inside (in mind, in soul, in heart etc) is just a ‘virtual reality’ which we have willed to be. We feel a child like bliss and innocence there because whatever we see and ‘live’ there ‘inside’ are fresh and new to us and always prod us to further our journeys revealing avenues to encounter surprises after surprises. It is in this realm of virtual reality people ‘see’ things that have never been seen before, hear music that has been never heard before, feel ideas that have been never thought about before, ‘smell’ fragrances that have been never smelt before, touch various objects and things that have never been touched before and taste foods and pleasures that have been never tasted before. There are some people who live in these realms got this terrific capacity and skill to reproduce what they have seen, heard, felt, smelt and tasted there through mediums that are known and identified in the outer/external world. They are often called as artists. That means, in the internal world of ideal things (sans any restrictions) every one stands a chance but only the artistic ones channelize those chances for the external world.

If so what could be the external world? The common definition is that the external world is what exists outside the human skin that means whatever we see, live and experience in the material world. This external world is so over powering that it hardly allows anybody to delve deeply into the internal realm. This world is the world of controls, habits and routines that people thoroughly enjoy. The external world as it is palpable and quantifiable imposes lesser fear amongst people. Erasing mystery is one way of making external world alluring everyone. Here everyone could think of becoming everyone else. Most of the human beings think of emulating those people who have done materialistically well. They have gone beyond the basics of roti, kapda aur makan (bread, cloth and home). They have improvised the basics to various forms of pleasure and everyone is seeking it. To achieve them, in the material world one has to have money because that is the only one way of exchange that the material world knows. And this is the world that people identify as the external world.

Here is a problem. External world is also a perception as intriguing as the internal world. The only difference between them is that in the internal world each human being rightfully inhabit, possess and occupy an autonomous world and there are no binding rules and regulations, and in the external world, every human being is meant to follow the rules and regulations created by the political authorities. Otherwise people coming from different strata of the society perceive and experience the material world in different terms and from different vantage points. That means even if there is an appearance of the world as seen in the photographs and maps, it is not so. People perceive it differently, interpret and understand it differently. That means depending on the number people on the face of the earth, there are as many interpretations and perceptions about the world, which in turn means that what we perceive is not what our neighbour perceives as the world. There fundamental differences. If that is the case, each perception of the world has to be seen as a virtual projection of the world which is given in the material form. Hence, the world we see with our eyes and experience with our lives is a conglomeration of various perceptions which at times nullify the other perceptions or confirm the. However, society as a whole with a political or military power to govern it standardizes these perceptions for keeping certain patterns. And it is interesting to see that to accept these patterns the people are prepared physically and mentally through various sorts of indoctrination by the authorities so that the people would eventually forget that they have two autonomous worlds (internal and external) at their disposal. They start believing that what is seen is reality and they learn to disbelieve their own perceptions. People do not have any problem to come out of home at a given time, take the same, go to office by same route, do the job, take salary, go home, do the same things and repeat the routine six days week for almost thirty to forty years, without any complaint. People who have fallen under the weight of routine not only have forgotten the internal world that they have but also the external world that they live in.

People try to rebel when the oppression of the rules and routine weigh down on them beyond a point. That’s why they go to the theatres, cinemas and art galleries. That’s why they listen to music and try to break free once in a while. What do they get when they try to break free by taking creative routes as mentioned before? What do they carry back once they get back to their routine? According to me, artists are those people who with their special skills express their ideal worlds through their works of art. Works of art are the bridges created between two virtual worlds; one, the world that exists somewhere else (you may call it ‘inside world’ but I would say that is the world where one realizes one’s own existence) and the one that exists right in front of you and you believe that it is ‘real’. As I said before, both are virtual worlds. Artists bridge them and the people who break free walk through these bridges once in a while and get the glimpses of the other world of ideals. I don’t insist that everyone stand on the bridge for ever or cross over to the other realms. They have their own priorities to do so. But I insist that those people capable of realizing the internal worlds for the external world, that means artists, are destined to be there in the internal realm and live an autonomous life without ever succumbing to the routine or rules of the external world. No meditation could help the artists to do better art or realize the internal world or gain peace provided if they are guided and goaded by the rules of the external world. As both the worlds are virtual the artists could make what they want; their comforts and luxuries irrespective of the rules of the outer world, but only catch is that those comforts and luxuries should be different from those of the routine world. To tell you the truth, the routine world works day in and day out for the artists to live their lives; one just needs to realize it.

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Think Before you Paint a God: Indian Artists’ Gods and the History of their Evolution

September 26, 2016, 9:12 am

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(Krishna, in a miniature painting)

In May 2014, when Narendra Modi became the 14^thPrime Minister of India with absolute majority for his party, BJP in Parliament, I had noticed how several of my artist friends changed their track of thinking. For some reason, I was staying with a friend of mine and he was euphoric about Modi’s ascension to power. He thought India would change for good and it was going to be a superpower. Without a roof above my head, I knew it was difficult to get into a political discussion with him for the simple fear of getting kicked out of his home in the middle of the night for telling what I really thought about the BJP and the Prime Minister. Slowly, as an act of survival I realized how I too was changing my track while nodding in agreement with him about India’s future development and appreciating his absolute faith in the new Modi regime. The picture of Narendra Modi sitting under a tree, wearing a pair of very expensive jogging shoes and impeccable clothes, with a book half read in his hands, sporting a benevolent smile and conveying friendliness through his undecipherable eyes covered with a pair of gold framed specs that I saw in an English weekly (I remember it was in the Outlook) kept coming back to my mind each time my friend mentioned his name and his own optimism. Things were not going to be easy for the artists under his rule, I knew, but I refused to tell this to my friend.

(Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister)

I did not stay with him for long. However, while staying here I had gone out in the evenings to catch up with some exhibitions that were on in a few Delhi galleries. To my surprise I noticed one of my friends who was an avowed secularist and humanist suddenly incorporating certain motifs selectively culled from the Mughal period in his painting in a condescending fashion. Known for his spoofs and visual satires, I thought this was the part of his pictorial scheme that used to be replete with social and situational lampooning. But the sense of timing of this new body of paintings made me a bit conscious about his other works. A quick mental review made me aware that this artist had brought in a lot of Hindu gods and goddesses in his paintings (even in sculptures) without hurting anybody’s sentiments. So I thought my friend was in a sense balancing his pictorial thinking evenly to avoid the future comments that he was only satirising Hindu gods and goddesses, definitely in an innocent fashion. With the Mughal motifs precariously placed in his works, I found somehow justified. Any other point of view which would implicate my friend of nurturing right wing perspective in his works could have been an over-reading which I sincerely wanted to avoid. However, the memory of those works was refusing to fade. Why suddenly there is an urgency felt by the artists to paint or sculpt Hindu gods and goddesses? Is it because of the changed political scenario in the country that demands more aesthetical respect for the Hindu pantheon? Or is it because the artists attempt to receive favours from the government and the affluent class that prefers to stand closer to the policies of the reigning government (of whatever ideological leaning or colour) and patronizes art?

(Lok Manya Bal Gangadhar Tilak)

There is nothing odd, if you think straight, in Indian artists painting or sculpting Hindu gods and goddesses. They have been doing so for a long time. With the disintegration of regional courts as a result of colonialism and also due to the shift in patronage for visual art, art in India, following the western model of thinking and practicing, became an avenue for expressing progressive socio-political ideas as well as humanistic concerns. Putting the ideas of ‘progressiveness’ and ‘humanism’ together would result into the general idea of secularism, which India adopted as its official policy in 1947, which was given constitutional validation by including it as a foundational clause of Indian Constitution. As a result of it, India’s art, despite the religious and political leanings of the artists, remained more or less secular with artists often pitching for universal human love and tolerance. From this constitutional advantage we could look back at the artists like Raja Ravi Varma, Abanindra Nath Tagore and Nandlal Bose, and the innumerable named and nameless artists who followed Ravi Varma as well as their own traditions of icon making for public aesthetic and religious consumption, as secular artists who did whatever they did as a part of political and social integration through a common cultural strain or understanding, that is the Hindu religion and its mythologies of both classical and folk versions. I do not think, however we try we could position the above mentioned artists as Hindu artists or artists with right wing leanings.

(Ganesh Festival in Mumbai)

Hindu-Muslim conflict had a longer political history though it does not reach up to those ages, as right wing ideologues claim today, when the Arabs came to the Kerala shore first by 9^th century CE. The Muslims thus came as traders let themselves to be integrated with the natives through marriage and conversion, and it has been undoubtedly proved that the early conversion were not political at all. Those who got converted to Islam, then to Christianity and even to Judaism were not coerced to do so, on the contrary did it willingly to escape the third class treatment that they got from the dominant Hindu religion. The political other-ing of the Muslims in India started with the establishment of the British rule here because they knew that considering the history of Islamic invasions in the northern part of India, it was best pitch to incite the Hindus against them, diverting the possible ire against an external power towards a historically integrated community of Muslims. This worked well for the British and the history of 20^thcentury is full of instances of Hindus and Muslims fighting against each other. Though the national movements had already started by the second half of the 19^thcentury, the Indian mainstream life was yet to join the resistance for the movements primarily led by the Indian National Congress were predominantly elitist and to certain extent aided by British ideologues. In that context there were two major attempts to get the larger Indian population for the anti-colonial moves; one, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s decisive move to bring the Hindus in Maharashtra through Ganesh Chaturthi Processions. In the East it was done via literature and reformation movements of Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Upendra Kishore Roy, Maharshi Debendranath Tagore and so on. Two, the strategy that Mahatma Gandhi used for involving all the regions of India accepting the linguistic variations meanwhile upholding Bhagavat Gita as a book of codes of socio-political and moral conduct.

(Changing iconography of Lord Ganesh)

Hence, it would be fallacious to think that the artists including Ravi Varma were unaware of these socio-political changes. However, they were not imagining these as primarily Hindu movements. The Hindu thread was seen as a cultural adhesive or a common cultural backdrop against which a political drama could have been unfolded. Ravi Varma was not aspiring to be a Hindu painter on the contrary he was trying to be at par with the European masters who worked in the medium of oil on canvas but without adhering to their dominant Christian thematic orientation and the pertaining moral values. Ravi Varma wanted to create something similar yet different in thematic and he found that while the Christian mythological characters had well established iconographies so that the artists since Renaissance could more or less work on those givens (Ravi Varma does not seem to have referred anything beyond the Renaissance art or even if he had, the pervading two dimensional nature must have dissuaded him to follow them thoroughly. Besides, he did not have direct access to the Greco-Roman classical art for reference except the Neo-classical art works that he might have got to refer from journals and photographs), Indian artists had nothing other than abstractions of visual values and qualities from textual sources translated into figurative modes as seen in the temple murals and temple sculptures. Ravi Varma wanted to break these visual codes which he felt as shackles and archaic and the aspiring modernist in him was trying to be at par with the western art by giving iconographic features to the Hindu gods and goddesses (We should also know that Ravi Varma almost ignored the ‘contemporary’ art movements of the west like the Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Cubism and Dadaism which were almost famous when he was alive) for establishing a modern ‘Indian’ art against the modern ‘western’ art from within the limitations of his understanding of both modern Indian and modern western. While painting Bharat Mata, Abanindranath Tagore was not giving a cultural weapon for the future right wingers. Nandalal Bose was not attempting anything ‘Hindu’ when he was painting the image of Shiva drinking poison.

(Ram breaking the bow- Ravi Varma)

The subversion of such images which were primarily used for imaging and imagining a nation which was still trying to understand its own boundaries and political courses, in the contemporary times is menacingly palpable in the Ganesh festival processions in Maharashtra. Though the Prime Minister of India, Mr.Modi once made a tall claim that India or more precisely, the Hindu India had the science and technological know-how to perform plastic surgery in ancient times and the proof of which could be seen in the image of Lord Ganesh, who has an elephant’s head and human body. The development of the iconography of Lord Ganesh is also around the 9^th century CE and previously the references of Ganesh were as a minor deity along the bhoothas and Ganas. Ganesh got absorbed into the Hindu Brahminical narratives as a part of the possible integration of Shaivism and Vaishnavism. The idea of Ganesh as an elephant headed deity itself is a proof that he comes from the nature worshipping tribes. An elephant headed deity can be absorbed into the main narrative only when it has a supporting mythology; that’s how we see Ganesh becoming the son of Shiva and Parvati and how a familial misunderstanding leads to the beheading of Ganesh and later reviving him with an elephant head. A very complex Freudian reading is possible to further interpret this origin of Ganesh but I would like to deal with it in another essay.

(Ram Subduing Sea- Ravi Varma)

The iconography of Ganesh, as we have been seeing him for a long time, is very clear. Like the Indian gods and goddesses Ganesh too has four arms. He holds a broken tusk, a sweet, an axe and a piece of rope in each hand. In some of the depictions we do not see an axe, instead we see an ankush (an mahout’s crooked knife with a long handle). As he is an elephant the Ankush is justified. In some other depictions he is seen with a stylus and a set of palm leaves suggesting that he was the one who wrote down Mahabharata as Ved Vyasa was reciting it to him. So we have a benevolent Ganesh with most of the mythological retellings underlining his ability to remove obstacles (Vighneshwara). That however does not mean that Ganesh is a warrior God and the title of the Commander in Chief of the God’s army goes to his brother, Lord Karthikeya (Murukan). Of late, if you have noticed (just go through the Ganesh images posted in the facebook during this Ganesh Chathurthi), you could see Ganesh idols, pictures, statues and all other forms of visual depictions with Ganesh holding a huge axe in his hand almost minimising rest of the attributes. It is a clear example of a deliberate subversion of a benevolent mythology. Ganesh no longer is the Ganesh of the yester years; even Tilak himself would find it difficult to recognize him if he comes across him somewhere in the heavenly path). This transformation is not accidental but a conscious conversion that the right wingers facilitated in the consciousness of the public. During the Ayodhya Movement in the late 1980s and in the terrible culmination of it on the 6^th December 1991 with the demolition of the Babri Masjid, we had seen how the image of Ram changed ‘radically’ and strategically. In Anand Patwardhan’s pivotal documentary on the Ayodhya March and its culmination, ‘In the Name of Ram’ he repeatedly shows the shots of the hoardings erected all over India depicting an angry and belligerent Ram, muscular like Rambo, armed to kill towering over the architectural model of the future Ram Temple. In these hoardings Ram’s gaze goes towards the horizon and there is no enemy in the vicinity. But the suggestion of the gaze was clearer than many words about it. The gaze had finally landed on the enemy, Indian Muslims; incidents of riots and pogroms since 1991 December are watched over by that single angry gaze.

(Coronation of Ram- after Ravi Varma)

It is interesting not only art historically but also politically that Ravi Varma who had given a clear iconography to Lord Ram never anywhere presents him as a belligerent warrior. In Sita Swayamvara, where a young Ram is seen breaking Trayambaka (the bow of Lord Shiva) to win the hands of Sita, we do not see a muscle man who is capable of lifting that mighty bow. Instead, Ravi Varma depicts him as a teenager about to be twenty, all enthusiastic at the prospects of a marriage but reverential to the elders and the king, his would be father in law, Janak, earnestly breaking the bow in the presence of his appreciating brother Lakshman. Of course we see an angry Ram in another painting where Ram is about to send an arrow at the sea (Lord Varun) for not parting to show the path towards Lanka where his wife has been abducted by Ravan. But here too we do not see him as a Rambo. His body is slightly effeminate with no muscles clearly defined (all the Rams with cylindrical limbs in all the films and even in the legendary Ramayan Serial were based on Ravi Varma’s Ram) but his determination to subdue the mighty god of the sea is seen in his anger filled eyes and raised eye brows. Again we see Ram in the Pattabhisheka picture (the Coronation Ceremony after Sita’s retrieval from Lanka) where we see him as a head of the family too benevolent to be rash or authoritative. His smiling face and kind eyes dominate the picture; what missing are the muscles. Only muscled being in the frame is Hanuman, the devoted servant. Ravi Varma was not a ‘Hindu’ painter and we do not need more examples to prove it. However, Ravi Varma is an artist who could imagine a nation with all its linguistic and cultural varieties, which becomes evident in his Galaxy of Musicians. If Gandhiji had asked the Indian National Congress, which was a ‘Lawyers’ Club’ to include the regional members in order to bring ‘India’ as a geographically imaginable nation, Ravi Varma did the same by incorporating different cultural traits in a single pictorial frame.

(Ayodhya poster as used as a cover for Anant Patwardhan's documentary)

As I mentioned before, after placing the constitution of India as the guiding principle for all the Indians, the apparent religious freedom allowed the artists to be truly secular. This secularism in my view was not just a clear case of artistic decision or pure optimism and trust in the government of that time. I would say, it was also a sort of wishful thinking of the artists to deliberately avoid mentioning religion and religious iconographies from their works. Let me explain it how. When Hitler was forced to commit suicide and once the Allied Forces freed Europe from the clutches of the Nazis, there was a total silence in Germany because the Germans were a defeated people then; their leader failed to lead them to a pure Aryan country. The liberal ones who opposed Hitler too were silent because the amount of injustice and death revealed before their eyes had literally rendered them speechless for a long time. They had to conjure up a new parlance to face the world and talk to it while looking at its eyes, without feeling any sense of shame. Due to this, for a long time (even today) Germans wouldn’t like to talk about the period of Nazism (while the rest of the world speaks about it). Similarly, India had seen gory sights of Hindu-Muslim fights and pogroms. India had just witnessed partition and its gruesome aftermath. There was nothing to rejoice in fact; sooner than later Gandhiji was assassinated. The artists somehow tried to wish away all goriness therefore all the mentioning of religion from their works (while the men and women of letters kept on writing about partition woes). There were only a few, very few artists who depicted the partition (read religious) strife of that time. For a long time, Indian artists did not touch on the issue of religion. It was rather a dangerous area to venture in because it would create unpleasant discourses. Investing the energies in the socialist, secular and progressive was more conducive for the artists. In that sense we could say our art for a long time has been the art of silence, and by now most of the art works have become the art works of compromise.

(a Buddha painting from India)

At this juncture, against the backdrop of whatever I have said so far, it would be interesting to see how and why in India we have a lot of artists who somehow instead of depicting Hindu gods or goddesses straightaway went on depicting the images of Buddha and Jesus Christ. Today, we know that both Buddha and Jesus Christ are not only religious figures but also philosophical and political figures. People from various strata of the society have used these icons the ways suitable to their purposes. The Indian artists who have painted Buddha and Jesus Christ somehow have felt that both these images are ideologically neutral. It is ironic at the same time painful to understand this surrogate representation of religious fervour of the artists. Most of the artists who paint or sculpt Buddha and Christ believe (yes, I say Believe) that they are the icons of peace. Even though I cannot and I do not dispute the fact that Buddha and Jesus are icons of peace, I want to say that there are socio-political and religio-cultural reasons for the artists to choose these two icons for their purpose. First of all, by the time India became independent Buddhism was almost a long lost religion (we forget the history of it being brutally decimated in the subcontinent since 9^th century AE with the arrival of Sri Sankara) but was chosen by Dr.B.R.Ambedkar for his political purpose of converting the Mahars (the Dalit community to which he belonged) into Buddhism. As it was a non-Brahminical movement and still had to prove a political force of some reckoning, Buddhism remained ideology free in the public imagination. Artists too took to this line; they thought Buddha is ideology free and simply a universal symbol of peace. The Christian community of India was rather powerful educationally and economically because of their allegiance to the colonial power, which later turned out to be a relevant and reverent ally for the future course of India, and it was more integrated than Muslims with less and less affiliations with the various Christian denominations in the world and their respective heads. So it was easy for the Indian artists to choose Jesus Christ as a symbol of sacrifice, suffering and endurance. Jesus was an icon which indirectly reflected the tortured artistic selves too. And interestingly, the ideological connotations of this icon got submerged in its universalistic stature.

(Christ by Suman Roy)

Seen against this historical backdrop, one would think that there is no problem if Indian artists start painting and sculpting Hindu gods and goddesses. Why they should be deprived of cultural representation? But we would at the same time understand the danger of it. Let us see a scenario in which the gods and goddesses of India are seen in a certain confirms mode, that means, any god and goddess should look like what the Hindu men and women in the street imagine them to be. Their imagination comes from popular depictions which are wrongly attributed to Ravi Varma. He was just a trigger and the contemporary iconography of the gods and goddesses has completely changed according to the whims and fancies of the artists who are hell bent on pleasing the prevalent Hindutva mood (sometimes, artists who work in such image making factories work quite innoncently too. They do not understand the political and socio-cultural ramifications of it. An artist who makes a Ganesh idol with fiery attributes perhaps is trying make it as severe and imposing as possible as demanded by the society and also to vibe with the mood of the society). The Hindutva ideologues are changing history and in its place they are trying to bring in a quasi-mythological history which does not have any logical standing. But anything that is not scientifically proved could stand in our country provided that is believed by many numbers of people. This brutal majoritarinism would force the contemporary modern artists to ‘follow the mood’ of the times. And those who move against it would be punished by over reading the meanings (as happened in the case of M.F.Husain). Of late I see there are some artists and gallerists suddenly getting interested in having shows with ‘god’ as a theme. And I am sure these gods are not really non-muscular gods; they are going to be belligerent according the mood of our time. Such artists will be celebrated for the time being but they do not know that they are inaugurating a trend where the lumpens start accepting this aesthetics and demanding the change of any other aesthetics which is not palatable to them. It is high time that we think about depicting gods and how.

(a Transformer)

In the Muslim countries, artists are killed for writing or painting Gods because the fundamentalists do not like the god to be depicted in any form because it is said so in the Holy book, Quran. In India, on the contrary, artists would be celebrated for depicting gods. But watch out; depicting gods in India also could cost the lives of the artists because the gods have already been transformed. They look like the Tranformers and the super heroes from the American imaginations. They are war mongering gods. Hence, if you depict a god as a subtle, submissive, caring, loving, genderless and benevolent being, remember, the street side art impresarios may not like it.

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The Curator is Dead and Long Live the Curator: Search for a New Word Instead

October 10, 2016, 2:50 am

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≪ Previous: Think Before you Paint a God: Indian Artists’ Gods and the History of their Evolution

( a conservator at work)

Recently I had an opportunity to attend an international conservators’ forum which was held in Delhi’s IGNCA. Conservators from Mexico, Spain, the United States and so on presented the problems that they face while going around and ahead with their works. For me, as an Indian it was quite heartening to listen that they face bureaucratic hurdles and they too have brainless councillors and politicians who give conservation works to contractors who in the name of beautifying and conserving either wash down the patina-ted bronze sculptures with acid or over paint them with black paint. It is not just an Indian problem. Suddenly came another issue that the conservators in the public museums face there; the ego of the curators. In the hierarchy of museum administration, it is generally viewed that curator wields more power than the conservator. Or at times, the curator him/herself doubles up as a conservator often challenging the specialization of the conservators. Luckily in India the competition and the hierarchic disputes within the museums (and the museum discourse as well) remain as ego issues between ‘officials’ who carry these designations around, without never flowering into a full-fledged discourse that would make the museum practices more sophisticated than as they are today in our country.

(a conservator at work)

What caught my attention was the curator-conservator tussle that had been irritating the conservators from the foreign countries. It put me into thinking. In India we do not have so many celebrity conservators as we treat them as mechanics who mend cars and motorbikes. The kind of reputation and regard that the vintage car restorers get these days still evades the Indian conservators who toil with the paintings and sculptures in the dusty store rooms and workshops of the museums. We do have organizations like INTACH that does large scale conservations in India and elsewhere. Interestingly, the name INTACH also reminds one of the institutions like the Archaeological Survey of India that does very interesting and important excavations in different parts of India, at times helping in changing our historical views and at other times paving way for ideological disputes that involves not only scholars but also ill informed politicians. Unfortunately, like any other excavation agency in the world, due to the fear of changing the historical discourse which is conducive for maintaining the history as a given, the ASI is also forced to suppress many of its findings and interventions in the historical narrative. I am not scholar to comment on either the practice of conservation in India or the excavations that have been happening under the aegis of the ASI. However, I would say, the specialisation that several of our conservators and the excavators has been underused in our country. When conservation and restoration together slips over to the practice of authentication of a work of art, it suddenly enters into a different economic discourse, which takes away the technical as well as historical nature of the work. This issue has to be discussed further by the experts in the respective fields.

(Curator Scot Schaffer- all pics for representational purpose only)

My interest here is to discuss the role of the curator in today’s art discourse. It has become a child’s knowledge that the world curator comes from the Latin ‘curare’ which means ‘to take care’ or manage. There is also a saying that the word curator comes from the root ‘cure’ which means ‘helping something out of a bad physical condition’. That’s why Carold Duncan once observed that a work of art is ‘sick’ in a museum that needs a ‘curator’ to nurse it out of a sick condition. The world curator also has references to the medical practice of preserving dead bodies. That means whatever art objects that we see today in a museum are dead bodies because the word museum comes from the world ‘mausoleum’ which means a place where the dead are preserved. That means both literally and metaphorically a museum means a house of the dead. Interestingly, we have contemporary museums where living artists’ works are also preserved and exhibited. That means, those works that are capable of reaching to a museum, whether they are the works of a dead master or a modern contemporary living artist, we could say they are dead bodies. In the economic circuit of art, which is the auction circuit, it is said that a work of art becomes economically dead when it reaches a museum. That means museum is the ultimate space where the dead objects are brought to rest. When a work of art plays out all its economic values and is transacted in the market, it is a body in action which needs rest. The death of a work of art is celebrated in the museum and the curator is the presiding official of that death ritual.

(Inside a mausoleum)

Today, however, both these words, Museum and Curator, have been taken out of the old discourse and are used for the contemporary purposes. Museums, moving away from the conventional sense, have become to play the role of expansive galleries that could afford to showcase high value art objects for longer durations and in the meanwhile, curators have come out of the old museum practice and have become itinerant professionals who do not really need specialization in any particular area of art. Pushing further for contemporary purposes, the word and designation ‘curator’ has migrated to various areas of commercial market where utility objects are sold not just for their functionality but for their aesthetical value. That means today’s curator is not simply a specialist who ‘takes care of the works of art’ or one who arranges the works of art. Within the museum as well as gallery parlance, the word curator till recently had some umbilical relationship with the original word but that too seems to have severed by the market forces. When the discretionary status of the word curator is collapsed for accommodating various practices within its blanket coverage, it has become a word that connotes someone who arranges a few examples from certain disciplines tastefully, intelligently and convincingly. This fluidity of position that the word curator has acquired by now helped not only the gallerists and freelancers to call themselves curators but also it has helped those people who delves in the business of life style products and home interiors. (To cite a stray example, recently I came across a news item in the reputed Hindustan Times newspaper, in which Gauri Khan, wife of the super star, Shah Rukh Khan has been qualified as the curator of her life style shop in Mumbai. Interestingly, Sakshi Gallery of Mumbai had collaborated with Mrs.Khan in showcasing some works of art in her shop as ‘curatorial efforts’ befitting for the new market realities. I am yet to know whether such a collaboration has given Mrs.Khan the confidence to use the term liberally in her business activities or it was just an attribution of an over enthusiastic journalist).

(Gauri Khan, life style curator)

I am a curator (with a post graduate degree in curatorial practice from the Goldsmiths College, University of London) who curates very less number of shows and of late I have been feeling a strong urge to call myself something else other than a curator in the professional context. The reason is simple: when everyone in every field is a curator, within the art sphere it does not make much a difference. We have curated talks, curated seminars, curated film shows, curated food festivals, curated furniture expos and so on. (It is just a question of time we have curated medical attendance. I think the medical packages offered by the high end private medical facilities in our country are nothing but curated medical packages which for some reason the doctors are not yet calling them, and themselves curators). We need to find a different word for this. In the case of music, sampling and arranging were started long back with the advent of the music and sound softwares. In India, A.R.Rahman is set to have pioneered this way of music production in mid 1990s itself. Luckily we have not yet started calling him a music curator but we have music curators and I have been hearing the name of TM Krishna, the rebellious Carnatic musician for quite some time and many other previously unheard of names. In a forth coming art festival Goa, I am told that there are fourteen curators from different creative disciplines that include the noted singer Shubha Mudgal.

(A.R.Rahman)

If sampling and arranging could make good audible music, why the same couldn’t create good art, food, textile, theatre, dance, literature and so on? If that is true, then curator is a word that has lost its meaning and purpose. The word curator has become an obsolete word in the contemporary art practices and expose. This word should be replaced by something like ‘sampler’ or ‘arranger’. There will be many questions raised at this juncture, of which the main would be, if museums are still called museums then why can’t the word curator remain in parlance. This is where the old habits of the market come to take an upper hand. Market always plays with the familiar and the comfortable. Even if the product is radically different and new, the advertisements use the age old belief systems to sell the products. If at all there are locations and events depicted in the advertisements that are unfamiliar for the consumers for the time being, the underlying message would be the same as in any conventional belief system; trust in the family unit, live and die for it. There are several advertisements that ask women to be bold and more forthcoming in the social life. However, the point of reference for them would be eventually to confirm with the familial values.

(DJ)

Hence, even if museums are dead and the curators also have become an extinct category, the parlance has to remain the same for some more time and in due course it will migrate to other practices in order to confirm the patterns of the market, the desire that it creates and its ultimate target, the family unit. Immediately after the Abstract Expressionist period in 1940s and 50s in the US there was a short lived movement of photo-realism (not the same photo realism that resurfaced in 1990s). The critics and writers found it difficult to find a suitable jargon to qualify the new style of art and due to this lack they resorted to the previous parlance that was used for writing about the abstract expressionist works. In this curious mixture we got Zen Buddhist and oriental spiritual jargons desperately trying to highlight the concentration and meditation of the artist to make the verisimilitude of an image. This has just happened in India, in the case of curatorial practice. I would say, it is time that we rethink on it and call it Art Arranging or Art Sampling or Art Jokey, Visual Art Jokey or something that would find place in the art historical and critical discourse of our times.

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A Dramatic Monologue of an Ageing Body

October 11, 2016, 3:19 am

≫ Next: A Forgotten Danish Cartoon Strip and the Way We Eat Chicken

≪ Previous: The Curator is Dead and Long Live the Curator: Search for a New Word Instead

This is about old age. When I was in my teens I was impatient to grow up. The very idea of growing up intoxicated me like everyone else in my friends’ circle. Like many of them I too did not know that there was an economy of growing up. It was not just a Complan thing. What I meant by growing up was all about setting myself free, free of all hurdles and shackles that the grownups had imposed on me.

I dreamt that once I became a grown up person I would do all what the grownups did, including smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, sporting a beard and moustache, wearing a lungi, folding it up to the knees, doing a job, getting married, setting up a home, making kids, sending them to school, seeing them growing up, getting them married, becoming a conformist citizen of the country and so on. I never thought then that those were in fact leading me to a larger and wider trap quite challenging and enticing at once.

In retrospect I understand that most of the people realize their dreams, if those dreams are the dreams that I have just recounted. To realize those dreams one does not do too many things. Just go by the flow you would reach your grave, passing through those milestones in life, experiencing them to the hilt, smiling and shedding tears, if your journey is not abruptly curtailed by an accident or illness. Life is fascinatingly ordinary for many of us and most of us do not think about treading a different path. Ordinariness and the quotidian is so alluring that the exceptional things look blasphemous if not dangerous.

At some point I decided not to be ordinary. I think that was when I really started growing up. When I dreamt of the grown up days, it was peculiar that the age group was not set. Had I wanted to become a twenty five year old man? Or it was an effort to become a thirty year old person? Was it the maturity of the people in their forties that had allured me? But one thing was sure that in my dream of becoming a grown up man there were no grey hairs, weakened muscles and wrinkled skin. That means I wanted to be grown up but eternally young. Growing up did not mean getting older or aged then. Youthfulness was the basis of all enjoyments and happiness in life.

(Literary critic, late Dr.Sukumar Azhikode)

Now standing at the threshold of forty eighth year of my life I no longer think about growing up but I do think about ageing. And it is nothing related to the fear of being discriminated, nor is it about becoming weak. But it is all about seeing life in a new perspective. It is about slowing down. It is about really understanding one’s own body and mind without attributing any spiritual dimensions to it. One could approach one’s mind and body in a strictly rational and scientific way. What does the body want and what does the mind crave? Do they want the same thing or different things? Do the former respond to the demands of the latter and vice versa? And if they are growing incompatible how are you going to hold them together? Will you leave one for the other jeopardising your very existence? Questions are abundant in this case.

There are chronic bachelors and spinsters who live their lives as they want and beautifully age and pass out of the academy of life. Married people also do the same. However, the loners get more time to contemplate on the mind body relationship after a certain age. If the partners are compatible they could grow harmoniously together and walk into the night of a life holding hands and disappear into the horizon of memories lashing in the minds of their progenies and successors. Such cases are increasingly becoming rare though these days. A great literary critic in Kerala, Late Dr.Sukumar Azhikode was a chronic bachelor and he had written in one of his autobiographical pieces that he used to caress his own body and tried to know what it wanted. Mind would respond in such moments and one could feel one’s mind in the finger tips.

(Chikungunya scare in Delhi)

Ageing is a beautiful thing. Recently I was downed by the Chikungunya virus as it reached epidemic proportions in Delhi. While recuperating I went to the doctor in order to find solutions for the resultant joint pains and muscle cramps. I told the doctor that I felt suddenly I became old or rather I felt the waves of ageing in my being. The illness has made me weak; my bones and muscles ache as I sit, get up, sleep or walk. Over a period I started understanding slowly my body which I thought was like a stallion held in control by an expert rider, had fallen prey to the virus. Today I have to respond to the movement of my body; how my wrists move, my knees bend or straighten up, how my ankles react when I climb flight of stairs or climb down.

It was then I turned my attention to the old or aged or ageing people around me. Now I understand how they exactly feel and cope with the surroundings. Dyeing one’s hairs is not always a way to look young and healthy. But ageing is something that could be healthy (despite many physical ailments) and beautiful. I have started seeing beauty in aged and ageing people. I feel, I am an ageing person now. People say that age is just a number and it is all in mind. Yes, it is all in mind. Most of us do not grow up at all after certain age. The same people who used to crave for growing up now wish to go back to their younger days when they were absolute carefree. If you are in a whatsapp group where you have your college or school friends you would know how you desperately want to go back in time and to be again young.

That’s the mind. If the mind accepts the age and be alert for the age that your body feels then everything is fine. That does not mean that an ageing person’s mind should be showing symptoms of ageing therefore ceasing to be productive, imaginative and creative. But the difference is that in order to be productive, imaginative and creative one need not necessarily be young in body and mind. One could create wonderful works of art or anything of that sort even at the age of eighty. Suddenly someone will pitch in and say that it is what exactly about a young mind in an ageing body. I say, a young mind inside an ageing body is an anachronism. An ageing body learns things from the surroundings by testing and also by imbibing. Similarly, a mind within the ageing body should also learn the lessons of the ageing body by testing and imbibing (here I avoid a further complicated notion of mind being inside and outside the body at once and for the sake of argument, I maintain that the mind is inside the body). Once that is done the mind will not behave like a young person who has a young body.

The difference between the young mind and the older mind, in an ideal situation is that the younger one while showing its tendencies to be vigorous and fast therefore prone to make mistakes due to lack of empirical experiences before, the aged or the ageing mind always knows how to slow down and avoid mistakes. I cannot help the people who keep committing mistakes after certain age; that means they have not learned the lessons of ageing in the right sense. Working out in gym, maintaining a comparatively healthy body and having enough medical attention around do not assure the ageing body’s abilities to perform like a young body. As that is the case a mind that resides in a well maintained old body would automatically correspond to the apparent youthfulness of the body and could commit a few mistakes (given that there are no warning signals sent out on the right time) and make the person ridiculous in public, if not unto himself.

Nature is a wonderful engineering system. We have been created by nature through natural selection, adaptation and improvisation over a period of time. Whatever deficiencies we had in the beginning, at the points of evolutionary junctures, have been corrected by the nature and it continues even today. This correctional process also includes slowing down. When a person becomes old he learns how to slow down. When we age we start seeing things around us as if they were absolutely new. They have been there but we were not seeing them because of the speed. Everything would look strange and unfamiliar in the beginning as you age. It is exactly like you drive down to your work place and one day decided to take a public transportation system. Sitting at the window seat you start seeing sceneries that you have been missing for many years. The same landscape, the same urbanscape, the same roads, the same streets, the same buildings, the same wayfarers all would look new to you because now you have unshackled yourself from the view that is given by the driver’s seat. Ageing is a shifting for good; you start seeing things in a different light.

When you slow down you start feeling one with the nature because nature is not in a hurry. The things that you want to do it in eight hours are perhaps done by nature in eighty years. That’s how the trees grow in nature. They are more enduring because they do everything slowly. That does not meant that one should assume the snail’s pace. No, I am not making any unearthly demands or suggestions. It is about the body slowing down, letting the mind to register everything and becoming harmoniously blended with the pace of the nature. Old age they say is the second infancy. Shakespeare also had said the same in his poem, All the World is a Stage, where he qualifies the last stage of life as: “Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history/Is second childishness and mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” If we could avoid the cynicism of the great bard, we can say that the slowing down in fact helps us to be children for the second time in life. Yes, there would be a stage where the sensory faculties deprive us of their service; but there is a stage till before that when we could see everything afresh, without committing many mistakes that we have done during the struggles to really grow up.

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A Forgotten Danish Cartoon Strip and the Way We Eat Chicken

October 11, 2016, 7:23 pm

≫ Next: The Secret Garden in Kastur Ba’s Life

≪ Previous: A Dramatic Monologue of an Ageing Body

(Moco, a forgotten Danish Cartoon strip)

People in north Kerala read Mathrubhoomi weekly, in central Kerala it was the rule of Malayala Manorama weekly. In south, we proudly read Kalakaumudi, which was a recent launch in 1970s. While both Mathrubhoomi and Manorama could cut across the invisible north south boundaries made distinct by curious differences in language, culture and eating habits, Kalakaumudi most remained as a South side weekly and took its own time to become a pan Kerala magazine. People read each magazine for different reason; Mathrubhoomi exuded both literary verve and a sense of conservatism, Malayala Manorama treaded along a middle path entertaining mostly the semi-literate and low brow-ist readers. Kalakaumudi, in a way set the editorial pattern for many other magazines which would start in 1990s; the first half of it had daring investigative political reports and the second half was a treasure trove of modern literature. M.S.Mani and S.Jayachandran Nair, an editor-duo worked hard to make Kalakaumudi a pride of the reader.

( a recent cover page of Kalakaumudi)

It was mid 1970s. India was reeling under the Emergency and its aftermath. I was hardly seven or eight at that time. My father being a political activist and a reformist subscribed most of the journals then published in Kerala and my mother was an avid reader of literature, eking out time for reading from her domestic as well as professional responsibilities and saving up money to build a home library slowly but steadily, which satisfied my quest for reading as a young boy. I eagerly waited for the latest issue of Kalakaumudi, brought by the newspaper boy every week on the stipulated day. What attracted me most in this journal at that time was a small strip cartoon which did not have any name. Each issue carried two or three cartoon strips, spread out in different pages almost giving a pleasant surprise to the reader. The cartoon had no title and no dialogues. Each cartoon had three columns and invariably in one of them there would be a vertical inscription along the dividing line, which read MOCO. As we did not have any search engines in those days, we called it Moco and almost had decided that the name of the protagonist was Moco. Hence, my mother called his wife (a spoiler of Moco’s adventures) Mocochi. Looking at this cartoon strip just before sleeping, lying down on one side of my mother brought smile to our lips.

(Indira Gandhi and Leonid Breshnev, the then Soviet Union president)

Those were the days of India’s or rather Indira Gandhi’s tilt towards the Soviet Union for cultural and militaristic support. So more than the American popular culture we had Russian popular culture to grow up with. Stories of Leo Tolstoy, translated and illustrated folk tales distributed in Kerala by the Prabhat Book House, Russian calendars that extolled their achievements in the fields of astronomy and agriculture and the grand literature of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and so on were the cultural backdrop against which we grew up. An occasional documentary or cartoon films that we could see in Trivandrum museum were from Russia. Before we knew any name of the western publication houses, we were fully aware of the publication brand, Raduga, which was a major Russian publishing house. Hence, naturally we thought MOCO was a Russian cartoon. And without any speech bubbles and specific cultural suggestions we thought it could be from anywhere in the world but it was satisfying to believe that it came from Russia. For us then all good things came from Russia.

(one of the Moco strips currently available online)

To tell the truth, I have always been very curious to know about MOCO. The reason is slightly un-academic though. If I say cooked or fried chicken was the reason that inspired me to know more about MOCO, one would feel that I am exaggerating. But that is the truth. In our childhood, with India holding up its protected nationalist economic policies, the markets were starved of modern products. Our food staples were always the usual fares; preferred meat was that of buffaloes or cows (we called it then beef generally. Though India is inching towards a total ban on beef for the coercive political reasons, Kerala is still one of the high beef consuming states in India and you would surprised to know that Maharastra where a strict beef ban is in place tops the chart). Vegetables were stereotypical and thankfully more organically produced. Eating chicken was a luxury as there were no organized poultry farms or chicken import from the neighbouring states as we see today. Hens and cocks were reared at most of the homes mainly for eggs rather than for their meet. Therefore people in Kerala ate chicken only on very special occasions like Christmas or special dinners. Killing a chicken from the backyard was an emotional as well as ethical affair in those days therefore the life expectancy of these fowls was more than what is today.

The cartoon strip MOCO had at times a dinner scene in which we found a ‘dressed’ fowl on a plate with its two legs raised up towards heaven; two wavy lines that went up showed that the cooked bird was just taken out of the oven. It looked so tasty then. Our mouths used to water when we saw that particular frame. As there was nothing to tell us that it was a chicken (it could have been a duck, a turkey or any bird), we assumed that it was one. We craved for eating chicken but in vain. I remember when the poet Kumaran Asan’s birthday was celebrated in our neighbouring village on the month of April every year, one benevolent uncle used to feed us chicken curry and appam. Kumaran Asan who in his poems propagated the ideas of non-violence was somehow remembered wistfully by me in the beginning because of this chicken association. People refrained from eating chicken because of economic reasons as well as emotional reasons. Killing a home grown chicken was a crime, felt by many. To neutralize the guilt of killing a poor bird in Kerala we had developed a maxim that went like, ‘the sin of killing would be erased with the eating of it’. However, I remember most of the women resisted killing a chicken and the abattoir in back yard was often handled by men who had been dreaming of eating chicken on a Sunday afternoon and obscenely eying the proud hens and cocks loitering around the courtyard minding their own business.

MOCO disappeared from the pages of Kalakaumudi after a few years. The magazine also took many avatars by changing its looks, content and even changing the editor. S.Jayachandran Nair went on to start Malayalam Vaarika but he did not carry over MOCO to the new publication though he could wean away the start writers and artists to his fresh editorial venture with the New Indian Express. My curiosity about MOCO simmered down as time went by. At times I used to think wistfully about this character. Perhaps, he was indirectly responsible for many glad eyed cartoon characters in the world. MOCO was married man and a declared skirt chaser. But each time his attempts to get a young woman in his bed were spoiled by his obese wife ‘Mocochi’. In this way this cartoon based itself on a cheating husband and an unrelenting spoiler of a wife. They too have their nice moments and mind it, those moments are propped up by Moco only to hide the nubile one behind the curtain or under the bed. Moco and Mocochi had a son, a small version of Moco and the expression on the Moco Jr’s face was that of a child crook; really the father’s son. As none spoke anything in this cartoon strip, we did not know what they were talking to each other. The actions were enough to conjure up mischievous conversations all by ourselves.

Finally, my interest in the topic of chicken consumption in India and particularly in Kerala took me to MOCO again. And with the help of Google, I found out that MOCO was a Danish cartoon. Created by Jorgen Mogensen and Casper Cornelius, this cartoon strip was started as a Pantomime cartoon in 1940s. The name of the protagonist, which I thought was Moco all this while is Mr.Alfred and his wife is Mrs.Alfred and the son is Alfred Jr. A Pantomime cartoon is something that does not have a dialogue and initially it was created for scuttling the problems of translations when it was syndicated to various publications in different countries. Though it was a Danish cartoon, it appeared first time in Le Figaro, the French magazine, where the character was identified as Presto. Later on the syndicating agency P.I.B took it and rebranded it as MOCO by taking two letters each from the names of the creators. Moco became a household name in Australia and the USA, from where it got syndicated to many other countries. Moco was a bold experiment in cartooning because Alfred the protagonist could transcend time and become a character anywhere in the world any time of history. He could be a Roman, an Arab or even an Indian in certain strips. However, considering the thematic orientation of the cartoon strip (skirt chasing which was detrimental to the family concept of the conservative America), in the US, this cartoon was seen as a low browistic one catering to the semi-literate class. Whatever it was, the appeal of the cartoon was global to certain extent.

Today, perhaps very few people remember MOCO in Kerala. My experiment proved it beyond doubt. I sent the picture to my mother and sister via Whatsapp and asked them to identify the character; unfortunately those two people who had laughed a lot looking at this cartoon years back, have absolutely forgotten him. I just wondered whether this oblivion came from the consumption of chicken, a blow of fate. MOCO had allured with his cooked chicken. Today we eat a lot of chicken. The change in global economy has changed our eating habits and chicken tops the non-vegetarian menu in India today. Market studies show that there is a 12% growth in chicken consumption in every year in India. Kerala is a very special case. The data of chicken consumption make sweep you off the feet. Kerala has a total population of 33 million of which 80% eat chicken on a regular basis. Kerala’s monthly consumption of chicken is 5000 tonnes of which only 264.3 tonnes are produced in Kerala itself. Rest is imported. In a year Kerala spends an average of Rs.2844 crore for eating chicken and each year Rs.1752 crore goes out of Kerala in chicken business. And rightfully, out of the five obese states in India Kerala stands second, a real gain indeed! When I think of those days when we had to look at a cartoon strip and imagine the taste of chicken, the change that has taken place within forty years is enormous. Moco has been forgotten by most of the Keralites but they have carried forward one thing from the cartoon strip: the chicken.

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