In a speech made in Poona in January, 1939, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar weighed in on the form that the future political map of India should take. He was eager not to allow a federalism issuing from the British government’s administrative divisions of the Sub-continent. During the course of this speech one encounters Ambedkar’s Republican spirit in political thought, propounding the liberty of man over the compulsions of state formation through a participatory style of democracy. As the architect of the Constitution of India, Ambedkar refrained from the idea of India as a nation, proposing instead a Union. The States reorganisation Act of 1956 did eventually allow for the formation of various states as envisioned by Ambedkar, as part of a unitary federal union.
Bombay-based artists Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Simpreet Singh and Zinnia Ambapardiwala who constitute the CAMP collective, choose 1982 - the year of the Bombay Police Mutiny. Described in media sources as the Bombay Police ‘Riot,’ it has been overshadowed by the better organised ‘Great Bombay Mill Strike’ of January, 1982. Dutta Samant, a militant union leader had organised the mill workers of Bombay into a potent political force that brought the conniving politician-mill owner nexus on to its knees. Postal workers, taxi unions and an association advocating for the land rights of Bombay slum dwellers, all worked in cohesion to disrupt a socialist government’s pandering to private capital. CAMP chooses 1982 from a position of geography, naming their film ‘Structure of a Forthcoming Film,’ which plays on loop for seven minutes.
The video is part of an exhibition conceptualized by the curator and art historian Arshiya Lokhandwala. Revisiting India’s seventy years since independence, the exhibition opened on 15thAugust, 2017 to coincide with the anniversary. The title of the show, ‘India Re-Worlded, 70 years into Investigating a Nation,’ alludes to a concept developed by Gayatri Spivak, referring to the imperial impulse to incorporate newly discovered colonies into the ‘world’. Lokhandwala proposes that artists have since de-worlded India; through a process of ‘re-worlding’ they investigate the promises, successes and failures of the political nation state called India.
A looped video of Rummana Hussain’s performance for her residency project at Art in General, New York, plays on a screen. We see Hussain pottering around with various elements of pigment, earth, cloth and objects as the audience engages the vocabulary of the performance. It is drawn from a deep understanding of India; born to a general and a politician, Hussain represented what India terms as progressive privilege. But unlike her comrades she never used it as her lens or position to comment. It was the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 and the subsequent riots in Bombay that became a turning point; politicising the Muslim artist overnight. The communal violence unleashed turned her - with her Persianised name - into a fleeing victim of mob fury. Her performance in New York happened months before she was to succumb to cancer. But her death at a young age was not a defeat, despite a fear of dying: she forged her own vocabulary of contemporary feminist performance earning her a place among India’s first conceptual artists. Hussain paraphrased the approach many artists would later use within their practices, one which arose from marginality and a rejection of the promise of the past.
Navjot Altaf paints the graphs of indices that denote share prices, growth and a burgeoning Indian economy onto the glass facades of the skyscrapers that dot the Parel district of Bombay. These buildings replaced the cotton mills and significantly, the venue for the exhibition was just one such mill-turned-high-rise. To create glass, apart from sand you need coal and other rare earths and minerals to create building facades. But mining is embedded in more complicated socio-economic processes. In India, mining has not only physically displaced several tribal populations, but has caused internal displacements as well, uprooting people from their traditions scapes and vocations. Oftentime, mining corporates become patrons of biennales, museums and art initiatives erasing the public memory of their acts.
Francis Newton Souza has a large canvas of Christ hung from a cross placed across a passage. Souza’s biography is often narrated from the context of his Catholic past and Portuguese heritage. This does not, however, make him any less invested in the movement of Indian self-determination. Souza was expelled from the Sir JJ School of Art, Bombay, for his involvement in the Quit India movement. Souza’s depiction of the church was a sardonic indictment of the people, namely the clergy, who denied the sensuality of human existence and insisted on replacing it with a constrictive morality. Ambedkar had a similar contempt for religion, as he thought of it as a preoccupation of small minds and Brahminical system that had created a creed and caste of clergy, extremely immoral and corrupt.
Justin Ponmany provides a view from the south: he chooses the year 1991. He talks of a particular morning, May 21st, when Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur was assassinated by a female suicide bomber from the LTTE. Gandhi had miscalculated the force of Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka, initially supporting the call for self-determination and then actively dismantling it through Indian peace keepers in Northern Sri Lanka. The onslaught was seen as a betrayal and Gandhi was unaware of the extent of sympathy for the movement in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. Consecutive Congress governments had misunderstood Tamil pride in language and the politics of rationalism that defined the Dravidian ethos. The death of Rajiv Gandhi facilitated a resurgence of the Indian National Congress through a minority government presided over by Narasimha Rao. Narasimha Rao along with his finance minister Manmohan Singh brought about a liberalisation of the Indian fiscal state; markets were opened, money was borrowed from the IMF, India veered away from its socialist ideology. Privatisation was rife and we opened our televisions to multiple channels and our lives to the age of the internet. Justin Ponmany suspends many objects that herald change or sing a eulogy of the Post-Soviet era at this moment in Indian life.
I now add to this essay, the text I wrote for a work by the Clark House Initiative: 18 artists from Clark House masqueraded as artists, cartoonists, architects, photographers, writers and sculptors to represent 18 artists from the year 1965-66, when Kennedy came visiting and they were commissioned by the Illustrated Weekly of India to commemorate the event. The artists of Clark House bring these pictures back to their original state, for example, making an oil portrait copy of Hebbar’s oil portrait. So they don’t present an archive but artworks that reanimatethearchive. These works do not exist today and thus by bringing them back to life, the artists present a critique on the idea of skill, the lure of modernism, the context of politics and the presence of authorship. It is a display of skill, idea and thought, which may be recycled, plagiarized and reconstituted.
A collective of printmakers from Kolhapur who work on political posters and wedding cards enlarge and reprint the drawing from 1946 of a man from the Bengal Famine. Krishna Reddy had worked on the efforts of Nandalal Bose to provide volunteer service in Upper Bengal and Bihar during the devastating famine. An early student of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s ‘Humanism’, Reddy was not keen to begin sketching the dead or reflecting on the travesties of mankind. He began to help dispose of the bodies and cremate the dead. Holding their limbs and the feel of the disintegrating flesh became a lasting impact on his relationship with sculpture. In 1946, as the Constituent Assembly sat to draft the Constitution of India, Nandalal Bose was commissioned to illustrate the book. It was common practice to work in Santiniketan as a guild; Reddy too was drafted into making illustrations for the book. Reddy drew using the thin lines of Chinese ink the bodies of women gathered in tropical Bengal; the man of Bengal emerges from a perspective of undergrowth that must have been green, able-bodied but reduced to bones. But the rise is akin to that of a Phoenix. The memory of those limbs he had carried formed the techniques with which he played with clay and later bronze. Learning from Ramkinker Baij, Reddy often allowed the material to define his form - marble from Carrara would allow suppleness to his thin figures.
Prabhakar Kamble along with Dyaneshwar and Mahesh Soundatte published books and prints at Dyaneshwar’s press in the southern Maharashtrian city of Kolhapur. Kamble, whose artistic practice is based on the dissemination of information and images for the Ambedkarite movement, was keen on transforming Reddy’s famine drawings to screenprints. With the collective in Kolhapur, he enlarged them and their distribution. Manchester cloth that replaces the sheets of the papers of the Constituent Assembly is used on purpose as it is the material of political buntings and banners. It is also the cloth that replaced Indian linen symbolising our market colonisation, the birth of Gandhian politics and the importance in it of Khadi, and finally, the production of this cloth not in Manchester, but in Parel where the gallery now stands.
Raqs Media Collective withdrew its participation through a conceptual act of giving up space, inviting in their stead, Lalthlanchhuaha Thlana Bazik to produce a work that discussed Mizoram and its tryst with destiny with the Indian Union. A simple but concrete contract was drawn up between the artist, Raqs and the gallery diving costs, receivables and authorship. The work is split, the contract being the work of Raqs and the painting on which video is projected the work of Bazik. This collectivity denoted an action of actual camaraderie between an established internationally famous artist group based in the centre Delhi and an artist from the margin, both geographically but also politically distant Mizoram.
India has been in news for the lynchings of beef-eaters, cattle transporters, leather skinners, supposed beef eaters (who it transpired, had mutton in their refrigerators) inter-community couples, inter-caste couple, clan-endogamous couples, inter-religious couples and people of African descent, among others. The history of lynching has also a sexual perversity, something to do with skin, the sex of the victim and vulnerability of the naked human body. Mithu Sen chooses the year 2017, where viral online videos show a collapsing teenage boy lynched by cow-protection vigilantes in Rajasthan. She collects fragments of many objects in gesso, bronze, and plastic. These fragments depict the exuberance of mob action; the energy of the mob that is not limited to any one community but one that rejoices in indiscriminate harm.
A quiet corner holds the quotidian white goods that adorn a middle class home. The last two decades have been dictated by material development and an acquisitive consumerist lifestyle. Prajakta Potnis transports a middle class home from the sleeper city suburb of Bombay, Thane, where she grew up. She maps the move through ceramic broken chipped tiles to Makrana white marble, the replacement of dull grey Kota stones in the toilets to marbonite tiles, the refrigerator, and the washing machine, all adorning the living space along with the television that resemble trophies of change.In Thane many gated communities are sprouting, ones which promise lavish amenities such as swimming pools, club houses, jogging tracks and a foreign architect. Home buyers move out of the malaise of unplanned development and socialist era low income housing into gated communities that separate them from their neighbours with a wall. They see it as a democraticisation of luxury, or a standard of living that reflects their class and probable caste status. This is the decimal population that today controls more than 70 per cent of the country’s resources; a conformist and subservient middle class that has built its fortune on the back of the many millions of excluded SCs, STs, and other religious and social minorities.
Desmond Lazaro repaints the lists, the forms and boats that carried indentured Indians to the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius and other colonial plantation economies. They often perished during the long journeys or lived under abject conditions, much like the millions who sailed from Africa across the Mediterranean. India can re-world if it participates in the many intricate histories it is intertwined in beyond the constraints of its nationalist fantasmical utopias. In 70 years, the use of marble - its proliferation and loss - best defines our nature as a people, interlinking as it does the aspiration of many. Arshiya Lokhandwala stitches together seventy years of India’s independence through seven chapters, defining each decade in memory.